


Like I Like My Coffee

by binz, shiplizard



Series: Strong, Sweet, and Often [1]
Category: Hornblower (TV), Hornblower - C. S. Forester
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angsty Swimming, Better Living Through Modern Medicine, Canon Disabled Character, Coffee, Coffee Addiction, Coffee Hell, Convenient Polyamory, Divorced Friends, Engineers, Fusion, Hotspur Husbands, M/M, Nontraditional relationships, Semi-Public Sex, Workplace Hell, Workplace Relationship, flatmates
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-15
Updated: 2014-11-02
Packaged: 2017-12-20 06:26:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 44,803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/884001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/binz/pseuds/binz, https://archiveofourown.org/users/shiplizard/pseuds/shiplizard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Not a coffee shop AU as such, but an AU that will eventually involve a coffee shop. Primarily it involves Bill Bush (longsuffering business analyst and massive extrovert), his flatmate Horatio Hornblower (neurotic programmer and massive introvert), and their desperate efforts to keep a dysfunctional software office afloat in the face of paranoid managers, incompetent interns, corporate espionage, and a shocking, shocking lack of decent coffee.</p><p>A man named Pellew's come from the London branch with a new project to redeem their struggling crew. Marketing is calling it <i>Project Hotspur....</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Bill

**Author's Note:**

> A merry fusion of the CS Forester books and the A&E series-- mostly the A&E series-- as run through the filter of corporate drudgery. Cleaves very loosely to the plots of _Lieutenant Hornblower_ and _Hornblower and the Hotspur_ , but only very just, and with other bits thrown in for added flavour. Will be updated very very slowly.
> 
> Side note: this includes some racebending and genderbending because while the Napoleonic Wars-era British navy was almost entirely white men, the fields of programming and general UK citizenry are not. 
> 
> Big thanks to grenegome for looking this over for us despite having no fandom connection to speak of; any remaining UK fail is entirely our own fault. The unnamed coastal town is entirely a fictional creation and not her fault either. 
> 
> **Content Notes** for ableism, particularly regarding mental illness, depictions of an abusive workplace, references to an off-screen abusive relationship, off-screen amputation, and speculation about an eating disorder.

Horatio comes in with a styrofoam cup and a grim look on his face. It’s a daily occurrence; Bill should be able to tune it out by now, but it’s Horatio, and he’s never really found it easy to tune out Horatio, and this morning is no different. 

He’s been working with the man for a year and a half, been flatmates with him for nearly the same amount of time, he’s used to his bad habits-- like going out swimming off the freezing fucking coast, and six-am Skyping with nerds like himself in Marseilles to keep up his university French, and his insistence on buying the dubiously labeled ‘espresso’ from Ozzy & Ben’s on a daily basis, but he still doesn’t understand any of them. 

Ozzy and Ben are mechanics. They’re amazing mechanics, frankly, and when they modernized the shop a few years ago they got even more amazing because they can both actually work the diagnostic computers and turn off Bill’s sticking ‘low tyre pressure’ light, but someone put it into Ben’s head that modernization also came with waiting-room amenities, and he delegated that to Ozzy, and Ozzy put in a vending machine and a coffee kiosk. Their customers are ninety-nine percent dock workers and red-eyed tugboat captains and the odd soldier from the nearby base, and the coffee is tuned to that audience-- about the color and consistency of tar. 

Horatio, who is a skinny hawkfaced hothouse flower from the City and not a tugboat captain holds out a cup of it piteously. 

“Look at this.” He sloshes the cup, and the black liquid in it follows the motion sluggishly. 

Bill looks at it, and then back at him politely, as if he hasn’t been doing this every morning for a year and a half. “Looks a bit thick.” 

“He boils it, Bill. Puts the grounds in boiling water.”

The kettle goes off, and Bill stands, ducking around Horatio to go and unplug it, pouring the water into the waiting teapot. 

“Then he just leaves them there,” Horatio continues, abandoning the cup on the little breakroom table Bill’s been sitting at. “Uses a strainer to pour until the carafe’s empty, and then he does it again. I could _chew_ this.”

“From the sound of it,” Bill says mildly, “it would chew you right back. Tea?” 

“Uhhhnnnnnn,” his flatmate whines, throwing himself into a chair and sliding down the back. 

“It has as much caffeine as coffee, black tea.”

“That’s a lie. That’s a terrible lie told to move tea.” 

“Look, this is a ceylon. Really nice. Give it a try,” Bill coaxes, like he does every fortnight or so, because he hasn’t really learned to give up in a year and a half either. 

“Nnnnnnn,” Horatio moans. “Give me my coffee back, I need it.” 

Bill shoves it dubiously across the table and watches with interest as Horatio shotguns down a mouthful and then shudders convulsively. “You could do instant.” 

“Have you looked at the best before dates on the instant in the corner shop? The latest I found was in the late nineties. I think some of it’s surplus from the Cold War.” 

“You realise people in this country have been surviving on tea for centuries, now-?” 

He gets another pathetic whine in response. 

“You could buy a coffee maker.”

“Filter coffee makes me poorly,” Horatio says miserably.

It does, too, Bill knows. Psychosomatic, no doubt, but awful just the same. Migraines and stomach ache and that splotchy rash the one time. “This stuff doesn’t seem to do you much better.”

Horatio takes a deep breath and shoots back another mouthful, gagging a little as he swallows it. But it looks like he’s coming back from the dead, colour coming into his pale face and even his ridiculous springy hair perking up. Which may just be it drying. 

“You need an intervention,” he says gravely, and Horatio just holds his coffee a little closer to himself. He may or may not have realised Bill was joking, but Bill wasn’t entirely sure he had been, so his friend doesn’t have to strain himself. Poor boy. He’d be the most vicious queen in England if he had a decent sense of irony.

Bill’s mobile alarm goes off, six chirping bells, and he grabs his tea, gesturing to the break room door. “Bring your poison, ‘Aitch. Let’s go.” 

 

There’s still half an hour until the meeting, but they need the time to check for new updates and get their files in order, and they meet up again in the hall outside the boardroom with ten minutes to spare. Horatio looks alive now, dark eyes sparkling, and he twists his mouth sympathetically when he sees the box full of paperwork Bill’s dragging along with him.

Henry’s already in the room, or at least his lower half is, one khaki-clothed bottom peeking out from the snake pit of wires and cords where the computers live. Horatio coughs politely. “Hard at work already, I see, Henry.” 

“Good morning, Mister Wellard,” Bill says, nudging Horatio towards a chair with his hip, spinning another out to put the box down on it. “Any problems?” 

“Just the usual,” Henry says, pulling himself back and out from under the table. His jumper’s covered in dust, and there’s some streaked on his cheeks and nose. “Video’s completely out, and when it does connect the audio’s static.” He brushes his hair out of his eyes. It’s too long by far and the lad needs someone to cut it neatly for him this time, but nothing has made Bill feel more like his mother in his life than that thought just did, so he banishes it back to the recesses of his brain. Henry’s only just passed his initial three months, but Horatio’s had nothing but good words for his work, and he’s always seemed clever and likeable to Bill. “I’ve been messing with it for an hour, but it’s barely connecting to the main server, never mind London.”

“Weren’t they going to fix that?” Buckland sighs, coming in behind Bill and dropping a thick file on the table. 

“The video conferencing or the London Office?” Bill asks, and gets a tired glare in return. 

“I’m only saying,” Buckland says, going over to the little tea cart and plugging in the kettle, “I saw Mister Sawyer’s car arriving before I came in. He will not be pleased if he’s come all this way this early in the morning to find we’re only meeting with ourselves.” 

“Presupposing he’s ever pleased,” Horatio says grimly, peering at his phone screen. Henry swallows a guilty laugh, and Horatio gives him a conspiratorial little smile. Bill pulls out the most pressing files from his box, and doesn’t remind Buckland that it was Mister Sawyer who insisted on 7:30 status meetings in the first place.

“Thank you, Mister Hornblower,” Buckland says. “Your contribution is invaluable.” 

“We’ve just got two new emails,” Horatio says, flashing his mobile screen at Buckland. “Roberts says the new protocols are going to take at least another two days, and Wolfe will still need to test them.” 

“Damn,” Buckland hisses, and pulls out his tablet. “Which is going to go over exceptionally well with head office in a few minutes, isn’t it?” He thumps his tablet down on the table when the kettle boils, stalking over to pour himself a cup. “The connection in this room is worthless-- how does a firm our size have such a terrible network?” 

His tablet buzzes, finally having fetched the emails, and he pinches at the bridge of his nose, gesturing with his teacup at the thing like it’s the source of all his trouble. Bill can sympathise; he does everything he can from his desk, and even then it seems like he’s dropped off the network at least once a day. The firm may be old and established, but unfortunately, the same can be said for the office. 

“Because the building is two hundred years old,” Horatio says. “And we have half as many wireless routers as we need for this much building, since we are in the middle of docks, rocks and nothing our ‘last mile’ is actually twenty or so. And mobile reception is not going to ever be good because-- I must emphasize-- this is a two hundred year old brick building and the nearest mobile phone mast is on the other side of the harbour.”

“I had to climb out to the roof to get a signal yesterday,” Henry says, tapping at the keyboard and pulling up the video screen. “Still barely got through. The rain doesn’t help. Oh, finally!” A waiting message pops up on the screen. “Come on, come on, connect.” 

“Having difficulties there, Mister Wellard?” Hobbs holds the door for Mister Sawyer, who pushes past like he’s tearing away the air in front of him. “Too much for you, eh, lad? Well! What’s everyone standing around for? Are we having this meeting or not?”

There’s a general anxious milling, everyone trying to grab a seat without meeting Sawyer’s gaze-- Bill ends up next to Horatio, on the far side of Henry, Buckland across the table looking tired. Henry keeps his eyes firmly on the video screen, his mouth tightening when the waiting display reloads as a timeout message. 

“I’m sorry, sir,” Horatio says, glancing between the projector screen and Sawyer. “We’re having trouble with the computer this morning. Let’s just ring in the conference line while we’re waiting.” He stretches across the table to reach the phone, adding in a murmur to Henry, “Just keep trying, my lad.” Henry nods and quickly taps in his login information, filling the screen with the waiting message again.

“Computer trouble,” Sawyer says, and Bill can see his focus coming down on Horatio, jagged and sharp like he’s smashed it against the wall first. “Hardly a promising start for you, Mister Hornblower. Does this reflect the state of your entire report for us? Hmm? Mister Buckland!”

Buckland’s tablet on the table when he puts it down too fast, his inbox still spinning as it tries to search for new emails. “Yes, sir?” Buckland asks, tone calm even if his voice is painfully dry. 

“Is this an indication of what I should expect from your update? That your team of software professionals is so beset by computer troubles as to be effectively worthless?”

“ _Please enter your Conference ID_ ,” the teleconference prompter says over the speakerphone, and Horatio manages two digits before Sawyer’s suddenly there, slamming his hand down over Horatio’s. They must be hitting every button at once, because there’s just one long drone before the prompter starts again. “ _Incorrect ID. Please enter your Conference ID_.”

“What are you doing, Mister Hornblower?” Sawyer hisses, still pressing down. The angry drone cuts to a dialtone.

“Sir,” Bill says, half rising, awkward. He wonders how hard Sawyer’s pushing, if Horatio isn’t pulling back because he can’t, or if he just doesn’t want to see what sudden movements will do to Sawyer. Sawyer’s everyone’s nightmare boss, but if he’s escalating to physical violence--

“Ringing the conference,” Horatio says, remarkably evenly, for all his tone’s gone dark and Bill can hear the anger under the surface. It’s always under the surface these days, whenever they have the misfortune of dealing directly with Sawyer. “Mr Hammond will be waiting for us. We can have the conference call without video.” 

“Who told you to do that?” Sawyer demands. 

“No one, sir,” Horatio says. “I just thought we should ring in.”

“You just thought, did you,” Sawyer says. “You thought you’d just go ahead, without any authorization. Do you not understand the nature of security, Mister Hornblower? Of what it means that this is a highly classified project? All of you young people on your mobiles these days, I’ve doubt you’ve ever heard of a secure line!”

“You need a passcode, sir, and there’s name and voice recognition,” Horatio says. “It’s a secure conference. It’s all intra-office.” 

“Not if we can’t see who we’re talking to, it isn’t secure!” Sawyer flings himself back in his chair, and Bill squeezes Horatio’s leg under the table while Horatio hovers his hand over the phone. He doesn’t seem hurt, at least, but Sawyer was a big man once, and there’s still a lot of muscle there, and Bill is going to make sure as soon as he can get Horatio alone. Horatio pulls back slowly, and Bill risks a glance to Henry, who seems to have managed the impossible, because the projector’s showing a desktop, the little hourglass spinning as it tries to pull up the video conferencing programme. “Someone could intercept it! It’s a damn phone line, how are you supposed to know when someone’s listening!”

“There’s a beep,” Horatio says. “It beeps when someone’s joined.”

“Excuse me, Mister Sawyer,” Buckland says, looking down at his tablet. “The London office is asking what the delay is.”

“Just tell them we’re having connection issues,” Horatio says, and Bill clenches his jaw to hide a wince. Horatio has an earnest, take-charge kind of way that people respond to, even if he’s not the one who’s supposed to be taking charge or that people are supposed to respond to. And with Sawyer as touchy as he’s been about his job lately-- 

“Just tell them, eh!” Sawyer says, and whips his glare to Buckland. “Just tell _me_ , Mister Buckland, who is who’s manager here? You seem perfectly ready to follow orders from your junior!” 

“I was only suggesting, sir,” Horatio says, and Bill can see the calm he’s plastering down over himself, trying to send it out to the rest of the meeting. Hobbs is watching him too, sitting quietly by Sawyer, and Bill meets his stare, trying to gauge if he’s going to interrupt. Hobbs has worked for Sawyer for years, far longer than Bill’s been with the firm, and if anyone can tell what’s going on in Sawyer’s head, or intercept him without being strung up for it-- 

“I’ll send Mister Hammond a message, shall I?” Bill finally says, when Hobbs just keeps watching. “Should I tell him we’ve just got the phone today, sir? I’m sure he’ll understand.”

“Yes... yes,” Sawyer says, and settles back slowly. “Perhaps... well, Mister Wellard? Have you earned your keep?” 

Henry swallows, fixing his gaze on the projector screen. “The video’s trying to link, but I don’t think we’re going to get a signal that’s any good, sir. There’s just too much interference.” 

“Interference? Someone’s listening in?” Sawyer bellows. “You damn fool, cut that-- unless you _want_ our entire meeting broadcasted for all to hear?” His voice turns sharp, knowing, and Bill forces his head still because the last thing he needs is for Sawyer to see him trading a glance with anyone. “Who put you up to it, eh? Who have you been dialing? Those damn French? I just bet they did, always sniffing around after our contracts. So you’re their spy, eh? You’re going to find out what we’re planning for them, are you, is that the plan?”

“What, no,” says Henry, as the screen fills with static, shapes flickering in and out too quickly to distinguish. “No, sir, of course not.”

“Of course not,” Sawyer mimics. “Of course not. Of course bloody not-- you wouldn’t be able to tell your arse from that keyboard on your own, would you, boy? No, no doubt you have help.” His gaze flies to Horatio, and a little past his shoulder in a way that’s far more disturbing. His voice is low and soft when he says: “So by all means, Mister Hornblower. Ring us in.”

Henry has the sense to cut the snow-filled video feed, and Bill hits ‘send’ on his mobile, hoping that that at least that will work, and get the email to London before Horatio’s done dialing. He gets an extra few minutes to hang his hopes on when Sawyer slaps Horatio’s hand away halfway through the phone number, stabbing the disconnect button until there’s a dialtone and pulling the phone to himself, hunching over it while he pounds in the number and his own passcode. He gets it on the first try, which is more of a fucking relief than it really should be, and they all sit back and wait to be connected. 

Horatio meets Bill’s gaze-- he’s angry, frustrated enough that his eyebrows have pulled down and created that line he gets over the bridge of his nose when he’s really upset. He’ll have a headache in no time. Bill pulls a quick, commiserating face, and then settles himself, getting ready to be the bridge between the technical and the managerial that the stream of industry must cross.

Terrible metaphor. He’s tired. Maybe Horatio’s right about the tea. 

“Well, about damn time, man,” Mister Hammond’s voice comes through loud and clear, and Bill watches Sawyer’s ears go red. They’re all going to be paying for this one. “I was starting to think you’d all been swept out to sea.”

“Speaking of time,” says another voice that Bill doesn’t recognise right away and wasn’t expecting anyway. “It’s passing quickly. If we could continue this, gentlemen?”

“Of course, of course,” Hammond says. “I’m here, of course, Charlie Hammond, Director, Engineering.”

Hobbs has his notebook open and is dutifully scribbling down the minutes, and for a few seconds, Bill can believe that they might just get through this alive.

“Captain Harry Foster, military liaison,” says the irritable voice from before. Foster, what’s Foster got to do with anything? 

“Ed Pellew, finance,” another comes in, clipped. 

Christ fuck is the project in such arrears that they’ve got Pellew on it? Dread trails icy fingers down Bill’s spine. A firing squad of senior managers is assembled right on the other side of the line. He knew it was bad-- they’ve been behind deadline consistently and the budget kept sliding out from under their feet-- he hadn’t known it was this bad. 

He can feel it as the whole room realises just how fucked they are-- even poor Henry’s gone pale, a cold vacuum of oh shit oh shit sucking away every other thought. 

Sawyer stares at the phone, his eyes fucking electric, and Bill braces himself for whatever’s going to come out of his mouth... but it’s just a fixed, “Thank you, Mister Foster, Mister Pellew, good of you to join us. I’m James Sawyer, managing director for this office. With me is Mister Hobbs, my PA, Mister Buckland, my development lead, Mister Hornblower and Mister Wellard, both on Mister Buckland’s team, and Mister Bush, our Business Analyst. I’m afraid I didn’t realise you would be attending, Mister Pellew, or Mister Clive, our representative from finance, would be here as well.”

“A pity, Mister Sawyer,” Pellew says. “It would have been nice to finally hear from Mister Clive. Perhaps you could be so good as to make sure his inbox is receiving emails?” Oh Christ has Clive actually been _ignoring_ Pellew’s emails? Clive’s as non-communicative as he can afford to be, but surely even he knows enough not to brush off one of the most senior executives in the whole damn firm.

“Of course, sir,” Sawyer says, gripping the table. There’s a splotchy flush creeping up his neck. Bill is beyond grateful to the endless coastal rain right now, because if video was on, and the London management could see the expression he knows he’s not keeping off his face.... It’s a nightmare. It’s a full-scale high-resolution centrefold nightmare. Horatio’s staring fixedly at the table beside him, and Bill can see that lightning fast mind flicking through what they know, what that means, what they might be able to _do_ \--

“I’m afraid Mister Clive is out of the office today for... health. Reasons,” Hobbs says. “I regret you weren’t informed, Mister Pellew.”

“I see,” Pellew says, and even the crappy phone connection can’t completely hide the way the words rattle their way up from his chest, and god above is Bill glad he’s not Clive. “Well, we must certainly hope Mister Clive recovers and can join us soon.” 

“Well then, gentlemen, if we’re all here, let’s get started,” Hammond says. “Mister Sawyer’s been keeping us informed of all your progress. Anything new to report?”

It’s the most strained status meeting Bill’s ever, ever been to. He manages about three words of his update before Sawyer takes over, answering Hammond’s questions with deflections and vague, optimistic nonsense just shy of all-out falsehood. Once or twice he makes up the odd detail-- meetings they haven’t had, reports not yet submitted, doesn’t even seem to realise he’s done it. 

The tension’s getting to Buckland, too, he’s looking more and more wan as the whole disaster progresses, his complexion falling somewhere between jaundice and curdled milk. Horatio’s quivering with anger, and Henry’s starting to smell like sick-up and sweat. Bill’s pretty damn sure he knows what health reasons Clive has for staying away, and he’s not normally one to dismiss a serious problem like that, but he is desperately wishing he could just climb his way to the bottom of a bottle himself right about now.

Sawyer presses on through it, trading brittlely cheerful tones with Hammond, but it’s knowing that not only is his boss dishonest at best and careening wildly into dementia at worst, he’s doing so with Edward Pellew on the other end of the line that’s making Bill’s ears ring. They are so fucked. They’re so, so fucked. 

“We have an exciting new project on the table as soon as your current product rolls out, that Foster will be presenting the details on. And since your reports have you so far ahead of schedule,” Hammond says cheerily, with more than a little edge. There’s something predatory in his voice. “We’d wondered if you’ll be ready with beta on Monday.” 

It’s sort of a suggestion and it’s sort of not a suggestion-- there’s some awful political thing going on here that Bill doesn’t understand, and all right, Sawyer must have been fudging some reports, London’s been leaning on everyone for good numbers, and Hammond is calling his bluff now, really twisting the screws. Now Sawyer’s going to have to admit he’s been a little overconfident, and it’ll be embarrassing as hell and Sawyer will be an absolute nightmare, but they’ll get the extra time they need to wrap it up and wait for bug reports after that and all go have an exhausted pint before this next big project rolls in. 

There’s a tense silence. 

Bill looks at Sawyer’s red, strained face, and realizes that Sawyer isn’t going to say no. Looks of horror dawn all around the boardroom table as everyone starts to catch on, and even Hobbs is looking uneasy.

He’s going to commit them to Monday _he’s going to commit them to Monday--_

“Mister Hammond, we can’t guarantee--” Horatio starts, voice grim and determined, and Bill nearly jumps out of his chair oh god that lunatic Sawyer’s going to murder him. 

It’s audio only, so the senior engineer in London can’t see the look of rage on Sawyer’s face, and somehow the old mad bastard keeps his voice perfectly level as he says: “Monday? For Beta? All right, it should only be an extra few hours for my team. I’m sure Mister Hornblower, whom you just heard there, is ready to do the extra work. What do you say, Mister Hornblower?” 

Horatio’s gone just white with rage, but he shoots a look at Bill, and Bill gives him a desperate, furtive headshake because _No you will get fired right here no do not cross him in front of Hammond he will eat you alive and then who will share the rent._

Horatio stares at him, and swallows, and says, “Monday, sir. Of course, sir,” through gritted teeth. 

“Are you sure?” asks Foster from the other end of the line, voice sharp and without the pretense of cheerfulness that Hammond’s has. He’s got no interest in playing whatever game Hammond’s playing. He sounds irritated. “I’d rather wait till I’m sure I’ve got everyone’s attention before we get into the American contract.” 

“Are you sure, Harry?” Hammond says, like he’s reading it off a script. “Experience or not, if we have to wait too long we’ll have to give it to another office.” 

Pellew’s voice cuts through, deep and irritable. “I think we have time to wait for the experts, Charles. And we in the finance office would like to see product delivered to the Dominican and to be getting paid before we start getting excited about working with the US.” 

Bill feels like a football. He’s going to be sick, and this is absolutely awful. 

“Monday,” Sawyer snaps. “It will be Monday.” 

“Wonderful. Then this concludes our call, I think.” 

The line from London doesn’t cut before Bill can hear Foster start snapping about ‘a waste of time, you shouldn’t get my consultants involved before you’re ready to--’ and then it’s a dialtone and Bill breathes out convulsively. 

“Mister Hornblower. Mister Wellard. My office,” Sawyer says quietly, staring past them, at the wall, through the wall. 

Henry actually shivers, and Bill sees Horatio’s hand catch his shoulder and squeeze. Everyone else is fleeing the conference room at a polite office shuffle pace; like a coward, Bill goes along. 

It’s half an hour before Horatio and Henry come back to the maze of cubicles, Henry red-eyed, Horatio pale and sneering. 

“Well fuck my weekend,” Horatio says, and sprawls into his chair, jams some unplugged headphones on, and starts coding. 

Buckland’s waited until Horatio and Henry are back to break the news to Wolfe and his team. It sounds even more absurd coming from him than it did when Sawyer committed them, and Bill struggles to try to explain that this isn’t about them or their work, and to just do the best they can. Wolfe, who is cantankerous at the best of times, storms off with a snarl, punching on his mobile. 

Bill stops for lunch and tea. The programmers don’t. It’s past six when Buckland drags himself away and most of the others wait for him to leave the car park before they finally sneak out. Horatio stays, and Bill sits flicking through his Gantt charts as if there’s anything left to do this late in the project until seven-thirty, when Horatio finally shuts his station down. The cleaners are already in, the lights flicked off all around them. 

“S’go.” It’s the first thing Horatio’s said since morning.

“I’ll drive,” Bill says, and leads them out to the car they shared this morning.

* * *

There’s a car already on the little drive when they get back to their flat around eight, an ‘82 Fiesta that’s seen too much weather and been repainted too cheaply, pulled over right to the edge to give Bill room to pull in alongside. That’ll be Maria, their other flatmate, just home herself. Maria Mason, actually, and it was a few months before they realised that between Maria Mason and Bill Bush and Horatio Hornblower they are basically some kind of depressing kid’s programme. ‘The Awful Alphabet House, where sleep deprivation is fun’.

Maria’s mother runs the single hotel in town, where business guests and people visiting friends on the base stay. Maria does not work for her mother, very pointedly doesn’t-- she works for some kind of call center at one of the shipping companies. Lots of time on the phone and doing five things at once while being yelled at in Russian, Bill gathers. She’s going to move up to Shipping Coordinator one of these days. She’s quite driven, in her gentle flower of womanhood kind of way. 

Traditional girl-- the kind who thinks Maria should rhyme with _pariah_ and knows how to knit and actually sew, the kind who wouldn’t move in with a pair of strange men under normal circumstances. Except Bill grew up here and she’s known him since primary, and Horatio, bless him, is so obviously one-hundred percent committed to the male sex, romantically speaking. So she calls it good, on the condition she’s not expected to do more than her share of the dishes just because she’s a lady.

He wouldn’t ask it, her hours are as brutal as theirs and her job is just as thankless, and she bears it very sweetly until she can she go home and unleash all of her miseries onto whatever luckless bastard is on the other side of her Xbox today. Unsurprisingly, she’s already tucked on the settee with the box on when Bill pushes through the door. 

“Bad day at the office?” she greets him, tipping her chin away from the microphone on her headset. She hasn’t looked away from whatever game she’s on and Bill isn’t sure how she knows-- except that it’s been back-to-back bad days for the last month-- but he grunts an acknowledgement and peers over her shoulder at the game she’s playing. It’s sleek and grim and futuristic and there are guns, which doesn’t particularly narrow it down for him. 

“Just Sawyer being Sawyer. London being London.” There comes a point where he can’t even explain it anymore. It all sounds increasingly implausible and awful. 

“I’m sorry, love. _No not you, I don’t care about your day. Because you throw plasma grenades like you’re blindfolded_. Do you need to talk about it?” 

“No. No, it’s all right, I’ll just go see what’s in the fridge.” 

He hears Horatio drag in after him and flop down on the settee-- “Head down you go, Horry, got to see the game, there’s a boy,” and looks back into the livingroom to see Horatio curled up on the settee with his head in Maria’s lap and his face a mask of misery. She’s stroking his ridiculous hair absentmindedly with an elbow, hands still busy on the controller. 

He jumps a little when she screams “FUCK YOU, FUCKER,” and settles when she soothes him, speaking over a hail of gunfire. “Sorry, love, some twat’s trying to camp where my overshield spawned. Poor dear, is it awful? _Coming on your left, I’ve got him._ ” 

Horatio’s got practice in speaking Maria, and waits out the interruption without having to think about it. “Sawyer’s going crazy. And London’s already built a new headquarters in Crazy. They want us to have beta ready to ship on Monday,” Horatio moans. “Even if I spend all weekend in the office it’s not going to be done. And then Wolfe will have to get it all tested by five on Monday. We’re all being hung out to dry.” 

“It’s not healthy, the way they work you. You ought to quit. _Someone go get that fucking sniper, I’m pinned._ ”

“I’m sure they’d be happy to give me a reference. There aren’t too many software engineers in Britain, having a terrible job record shouldn’t be a problem at all--” 

“But you’re such a good software engineer,” she says, ignoring the horrified face he gets whenever someone praises him. “You could do loads better than this place.” 

“But I like vehicle integrated systems and GPS programming. Maria, I could wind up writing graphical interfaces for awful corporate applications. I need _this_ job.” 

“Still it isn’t fair,” she says, frowning. “Someone should say something to them.” 

“Pot Noodle for dinner?” Bill asks, after he’s confirmed that no, a magical elf hasn’t come to restock the cupboard or the fridge. 

“Sounds lovely _ALL RIGHT, LADS, ALL RIGHT, RED!_ ,” Maria assures him. Horatio makes a sound that’s half agreement, half existential despair, which is basically a yes when it comes down to it. 

Bill surveys the options. “Piri Piri Chicken, Chilli Beef, or Sweet and Sour?”

“Sweet and Sour,” Maria says instantly, then, “ _Nah, just one more match, flatmates are home_.” 

Horatio mumbles “Chilli Beef” into her lap, then again after lifting his head so Bill can actually hear him.

Leaving Bill with the Piri Piri Chicken, but that’s his favourite anyway. Well, after Sweet and Spicey, but you can’t get that one anymore, not even at the corner market which, not to give too much weight to Horatio’s claims of Iron Curtain instant coffee, does seem to have a shocking surplus of everything. 

Horatio moans miserably, and Bill fills the kettle and flicks it on, then drags himself off to his room to get out of his suit. He hasn’t had time to do laundry, and the last thing he needs to do is get instant noodles on his one clean shirt. “Watch the water, ‘Aitch?” he calls back. 

Horatio moans again, which means he heard him, so Bill takes it as agreement and fetches out a pair of jeans and a jumper. He won’t bother asking Horatio to make him a cup of tea. That would probably push the poor thing over the edge. 

Horatio has dragged himself into the kitchen by the time Bill’s dressed in non-work clothes, carefully pouring water into the little pots, stabbing at the noodles with a spoon. Bill takes the spoon and elbows him kindly out of the way. “Go get out of your work stuff. You’ll feel better.”

“Just want me out of my clothes,” Horatio mutters, and Bill nods sagely.

“It would be an advantage.” Bill is not one hundred percent committed to the male sex, a large portion of the pie chart of his soul given over to ‘women, are they lovely (yes)’ and ‘women, to sleep with (a good thing)’ but what percentage of him is same-sex oriented is amply large enough to contain fussy city boys with huge dark eyes and ridiculous hair. This is simply something they have come around to, him and Horatio. “You want to, tonight-?” 

“No. I’m going in tomorrow morning. I’ll need the sleep.” 

Fuck his weekend indeed. Bill winces. “Want me to bring you lunch, around noon?” 

He watches Horatio’s neurotic need Not to Be A Bother war with the idea of eating something besides protein bars while he blows his Saturday in the office. “...yeah. I’d like that. Thank you.” 

“Done, then,” Bill agrees. “Pass me the eggs?” There are only two, but he fries them up to mix in with the noodles. He’ll run errands in the morning, restock the fridge and the cupboard, then run lunch to Horatio, and do laundry in the afternoon. It’s not exactly a wild weekend, but it’s about the regular pace, and he won’t be spending it hunched over a work computer.

Horatio rallies by the time the pots are passed out and the three of them are tucked in on the settee, enough to be smiling that crooked, shy smile of his through the latest recorded episode of _Top Gear_.

“Horry, love, that’s my shoulder,” Maria says after the episode’s done and they’ve switched over to whatever movie BBC Two’s showing tonight. It’s got Molly Ringwald in it, but that’s all Bill can say for sure. “Wake up, darling, and go to bed. Pass me my knitting basket?” 

“Are you sure you shouldn’t, too?” Bill asks, grabbing the basket so that Horatio doesn’t have to. 

“Mm, nah, just fine,” she says. “I’ve got another hour in me. You?”

“Might have an hour,” he says. “Come on, ‘Aitch. I’ve got you.” He hauls Horatio up to his feet, complaining, and over to his little room. Horatio peels out of his slacks and shirt and falls face first into bed.

It looks like an amazingly good idea, actually. He hadn’t realized how tired he’d gotten. His side is cold where he was sitting against Horatio, and it makes him want to nest into his blankets.

“Maria--” it breaks off in a massive yawn.

“Not an hour, then?” 

“Not an hour, no.” 

“Head to bed, Bill. I’ll keep it down out here.” He hears the whir of the DVD player behind him as he staggers to his own room and takes his leg off, but his eyes shut as soon as he hits the pillow and he doesn’t last through the credit music of whatever she puts on.

* * *

Horatio’s long gone by the time Bill wakes up, a cereal bowl and spoon drying in the rack, the empty cereal box and milk bottle on the recycling pile, and his old beat up Vauxhall Astra gone from where it’s usually rusting up the street. It’s a risky move taking that car, the thing runs about half as often as it doesn’t, but it means Bill has the reliable motor, so he appreciates the thought. 

Maria’s left too, he caught her just as she was headed out to her running group and book club, and traded a grunt for a kiss on the forehead, a fresh cup of tea, and the start of a list for the shopping. He showers, does the hoovering, watches the clock much too closely, and tries not to worry. He talks himself out of heading over early the whole time he’s at the corner shop trying to find half the things on the list-- he’d be absolutely no good, there’s nothing he can do other than distract Horatio which is the last thing anyone needs. So he goes home, stocks the fridge and pantry, makes a couple of sandwiches and fills a bag with fruit, and heads down to the car at a perfectly reasonable half eleven. 

He hears the sirens and assumes there’s been an accident at the warehouse across the way. He doesn’t have a moment of fear, no strange precognition that something’s gone wrong. No, he’s completely knocked out when he takes the last turn and sees the ambulances and all the police in the car park of the building, some paramedics standing around as a stretcher comes out of the front doors guided by yet more paramedics.

Oh fuck oh shit what. He strains to see who’s on the stretcher before it’s loaded into the back of the ambulance-- looking for familiar ridiculous hair, miles of bony leg. But it isn’t Horatio, he’s pretty sure, mostly sure that wasn’t Horatio. And then another stretcher comes out and is loaded up and Christ fuck.

He parks as close to the building as he can without getting any glares from the police, comes jogging up and doesn’t realize he’s grabbed the bag of fruit and sandwiches until it’s too late, and he’s being braced by a short man in a uniform and barked some questions about what he’s here for. 

“My flatmate, he works here, I was bringing him lunch--” Bill lifts the bag defensively. 

“On a Saturday?” 

“Yes, because we have a massive bloody deadline coming up Monday and he’s pulling overtime,” Bill retorts, really not liking the suspicion in the policeman’s voice. He knows he shouldn’t be swearing at a cop but where is Horatio what the hell’s going on. “Look, his name’s Hornblower. Horatio Hornblower, I’m not being funny, he’s about my age, so tall, is he hurt?” 

“What’s your name?” 

“Look, what the hell is going on?” his temper isn’t precisely snapping. Bill has a hold on his anger, but he’s allowing it out. That’s all. 

The cop pulls out a notebook and looks at him coolly. “I’d like to see some ID.” 

He fumbles his wallet out, awkward while he’s still holding the lunchbag, and thrusts it at the man. 

“Bush?” the man asks, unnecessarily in Bill’s opinion, scribbling down his name and address. 

“Yes.” 

“William King?” 

“ _Yes_.” 

The cop hands his license back. “Did someone contact you, tell you to come here?” 

“No, Christ. Horatio told me yesterday he’d have to come in this weekend and I said I’d bring him lunch. I was bringing him lunch,” Bill reiterates, gripping the bag like a lifeline to sanity. 

Another car comes up the road, speeding, pulls into the parking lot with a screech of tires. It’s a nicer car than his. Bill knows it. 

“Bush!” Hobbs snaps as he gets out. He’s got an old windbreaker and a pair of jeans on. Bush has never seen him in anything less than a suit. There’s dog hair all over his legs. “What’s happened?”

“I don’t know, they won’t tell me,” Bush snaps back. 

“Who are you?” snaps the cop. 

“Guy Hobbs. I’m James Saywer’s personal assistant-- he rang me, maybe half an hour ago, I’ve only just got the message. Where is he?” 

“On the way to the hospital. You’ve just missed him,” the cop says, and Hobbs goes pale. “What did he say on the phone?” 

Hobbs looks at Bush, back at the policeman. “I’ve got the voicemail. You can hear it.” 

The policeman gives Bill another once-over and appears to decide he doesn’t have anything useful to say. “Wait out here. Don’t go anywhere until we’ve cleared you to leave.” 

“For fu-- listen, my flatmate, is he all right?” 

“He’s fine,” the cop says shortly, and then briskly leads Hobbs inside. 

So Bill flops in the grass in the sunshine, feeling a little like he’s got the shakes, ignoring the stares of the cops. After a while he eats one of Horatio’s apples. And then he rings Maria, catching _her_ voicemail, leaving a quick clipped message about something’s happened, don’t know what, Horatio’s all right but the police are here, I’ll bring him home as soon as I can. 

Eventually Hobbs is led back out, a few more police officers with him now than just the one he went in with, but they must not be prime suspects or what the fuck even, because he comes over to stand beside Bill.

Bill clamps the apple core in his teeth so he can use both hands to get upright, then uses it to gesture at Hobbs. “And?” Hobbs stares impassively at him, that same blank, just shy of hostile look he’s seen a hundred times. “Damn it, man, what’s happening?”

Hobbs sighs, shakes his head. “They didn’t tell me exactly.” 

“There were _people on stretchers_.” 

“Mister Sawyer,” Hobbs says. “And from what I gathered, Mister Wellard too.” 

“Christ.” Henry. Bill hadn’t even known Henry was going to be there today. “What _happened_ , did you see Horatio, did they tell you anything?” 

“They’re being pretty cagey about it.” The PA’s face goes all shuttered and strained, and after generally seeing the man as a hostile force on the workplace battlefield, Bush is surprised how unsettled he is to see him like this. “Look, you know Sawyer’s not been at his best. You all know that, you certainly haven’t been subtle about showing it,” he adds, with some heat. “He’d been having some trouble. He was on some medications. But that conference with Hammond--” Hobbs swallows. “You know he did a lot of security work during the Cold War. He’s got convinced that Papillion Labs is working with the Russians, and when he rung today he said he had proof that Wellard was in on it.” 

Bill stares. “Did you believe him?” 

“Of course I didn’t fucking believe him,” Hobbs nearly bellows. “The bloody Russians? Jesus.” He covers his face with his hand, cradling his forehead. “Jesus, James. He’s been working too hard. London’s been pushing him-- I swear, Hammond rings every day. They couldn’t even let him finish one more goddamn project. He was going to retire as soon as this thing with the Dominican was done. Why the hell do you think Hammond dangled the American project in his face like that? Christ. This company wouldn’t have any military contracts if he hadn’t brought his expertise and his networks in with him back in the 90s. He was one of the greats. Now look at him. He’s been barely holding it together-- he didn’t. Christ.” 

“Hobbs--” 

“He came here.” Hobbs waves a frustrated hand at the building. “I don’t know what he thought he’d do. He gave me my first job, you know that? It was the 80s. No one would give me a shot. But he did and I stayed with him, and now look at him. Christ. I’m going to need to ring his sister.”

“ _But what happened_?”

Hobbs looks at him like he hasn’t been paying attention, and Bill tries not to scream. “A confrontation-- two men down, one left standing? Doesn’t look good. They’d pegged your boy for it,” he adds. 

Fuck shit he knew that cop had been hedging. “Did they _arrest_ him?”

“I don’t think so. I tried to talk them out of it, at least.” He catches Bill’s expression and scowls. “Don’t you look at me like that, Bush. I think he’s a rude little bastard without the sense God gave a housefly, but he wouldn’t assault Sawyer. Try to get him committed, yes. Assault, no.” 

“Yeah. You’d think that,” Bill says bitterly. There are rumors that followed Horatio from the London office. 

“I do think that, you little jackass,” Hobbs says bitterly. “I think if he thought it was the right thing, he’d do it and commit career suicide in a heartbeat. He just wouldn’t ask if there was a better way. Thinks he knows best all the damn time.” 

Bill is spared from saying something rude or awkward or horrible because the front doors open and a few cops come out, and behind them is thank God Horatio. 

The notebook cop leads his flatmate over, pale and angry and miserable looking, and stabs a finger at Bush. “We’ll need your number, in case there’s any further questions, an address to contact you at.” Then, after Bill’s given it, he adds a little less menacingly: “And a contact number and address for you, too, sir.”

Hobbs gets ‘sir’, of course. Bill couldn’t roll his eyes harder if he tried. 

Hobbs doesn’t pay it any attention, just giving the cop one of those irritated, blank, just shy of hostile looks, and bruskly confirms where the paramedics took Sawyer before storming off.

“Henry,” Bill says. “Is he-- do his parents know?”

“They’ve been notified,” the cop says. PC Bailee. Bill notes the nameplate, now that Horatio’s here and not in handcuffs and not on a stretcher and he can start actually using his brain again. “I’m afraid I have to request that you leave now. Both of you,” he adds, looking between Horatio and Bill. He doesn’t look like it’s bothering him at all to ask. 

Bill scowls, putting a hand on Horatio’s back and leading him towards their car. “Come on, ‘Aitch, I brought your lunch.” He gestures with the bag. “You must be starving.”

“...My keys are still on my desk. And my coat. And my rucksack.” Horatio says, and they have to turn back and trade glowers with PC Bailee some more while another cop goes in and gets Horatio’s stuff because they’re not even letting him back into the building while it’s still a suspicious scene. So much for beta by Monday. He’s going to have to ring Buckland, and happily pass this all over to him.

Horatio’s quiet as they trudge over to the car park, giving Bill a nod as he gets into his Vauxhall. 

“You sure?” Bill asks. “We could come get it later.” But Horatio jerks his head no and shuts the door. Bill waits a minute to see if it’ll actually start before getting into the more reliable of the two cars, following him back towards the flat with his mind whirling. 

Sawyer snapped. Horatio was there. Somehow this led to stretchers. They’re all fucked, deadline is fucked, fuck fuck fucky fuck. Horatio hasn’t eaten lunch yet. 

He rings Buckland in the car, numb to potential tickets, and gives a basic report in clipped tones while Buckland sputters, and hangs up without really listening. So that’s a done thing. Hooray. 

He can’t stop worrying about Horatio. About Hobbs’ little dig. Because everyone knows why Mister Haitch Hornblower got shuffled out of the London office, don’t they, everyone knows that he had a fight with another programmer over the same man, and while he’s sure it didn’t go like that, it’s the story. That he’s a jealous, conniving little sod who’ll run tattling to get you in trouble if you cross him. What’s the narrative coming out of this incident going to be? God, if they try to fire him over this Bill’s going to scream. 

He sits in his car a while once they’re home-- Horatio goes up the stairs to the flat in a storm of movement. Bill just sits and lets his stomach roil. 

 

By the time he musters up the energy to get into the house himself, prying himself out of the quiet car painfully, Horatio’s sitting in front of his desktop computer with a thumb drive in, working on what looks like the interface code for their poor little project. He won’t be able to debug or test it in any meaningful way until he gets back to the office, but he’s coding anyway, face grim and punctuated gibberish that means something only to machines and Horatio spooling out across the screen. 

Maria’s deliberately not talking to him, curled up with a single-player something or other with cheerful blocks and gentle music, making her presence as unintrusive as possible. 

Bill abandons the lunch bag on the kitchen counter, slumping against the wall. He’s exhausted. He’s worried. He wants to know what the hell happened. He wants to help Horatio, but he can’t until he knows what he needs, and Horatio closes up tighter than a bank vault when he’s upset. 

Maria glances over at him, her expression concerned, questioning. Bill thins his lips tight, and tries to figure out how he’s going to ask this. 

“So. Heard Sawyer cracked.” 

Brilliant. He is absolutely the suavest. Maria gives him a politely appalled look in the reflection of the television screen. Yes, all right, he knows.

Horatio’s expression gets tangled up between furious and miserable. “Did Hobbs say that?” 

“Not in so many words,” Bill admits. “But he said he’s been on medication. And he thought Henry was working for the Russians. Or the French. I’m not sure.”

“The French,” Horatio says dully. “Mostly. And to discredit him generally. He blamed us, Henry especially, for the meeting yesterday. He was... he wasn’t well, Bill. I don’t think he knew where he was, exactly.” He rattles out a few more angry lines on his keyboard. 

“Did he threaten you?” Bill asks, trying not to patronise. Horatio’s so awkward, and sometimes he starves for comfort and sometimes he’s so pent up with... whatever he’s pent up with, guilt or anger that he can’t really be touched. He wears his emotions like a merit badge, but it’s harder to tell if you’ll get your hand snapped at for trying to reach for them. 

“He went after Henry with a fire extinguisher.” Horatio’s expression collapses in on itself, pure unhappiness. “He hit him a couple times before I could pull him off-- I think I hurt his wrist. I shoved him in a closet. He hit his head. I rung 999.” His shoulders buck. “The police came.” He shakes his head, eyes wet, lips twisted. “I know what happens now.”

“Oh ‘Aitch,” Bill says. “That crazy old man.”

“It’ll be all ‘you should have rung first and stayed out of it’, ‘are you sure you didn’t use undue force’, and ‘tell us about the personality conflicts you’d been having,’” Horatio goes on bitterly. “And nobody in the office will blame me, that’s the damnedest part. They’ll all go on assuming that I belted him one because I was angry and they’ll say I had a right to and nobody will believe that if I’d had any other way--” 

“I believe you,” Bill says, watching Horatio’s fingers stabbing convulsively at the keys. He usually likes to watch Horatio when he’s coding, because he’s really something when you get him going. This is less sexy, more keyboard acupuncture. He hears himself trying to explain and realizes it’s an awful idea, the words still spilling out as if by stating the obvious it will comfort Horatio somehow. “We’ve all seen how Sawyer’s been. And Henry will back you up. It’s just. It’s hard. When you’re ‘that guy who got some guy given an ASBO because he was jealous.’” 

“An ASBO and a restraining order.” Horatio’s hands flatten out on the keyboard and then slam down, filling his editor window with text even more random than code usually looks to Bill. “Three years of talking down Archie in front of his friends and lying to him and hiding his medication and Archie making _excuses_ for him and all it wound up with in the end was an ASBO and a restraining order. I shouldn’t have rung the police, I should have _hit him with a fucking car_ , but I didn’t because I was doing things _the right way_ ,” he snaps, and is up and out of his desk chair in a long-limbed whirl of motion. 

“Christ, ‘Aitch. You know I didn’t mean it like that. Horatio. I’m sorry--” Bill starts, and Horatio storms right past his apologies and slams the door behind him as he goes. 

“Now he’s off,” Maria sighs from the settee, and hits a button on her controller to turn the console off. “Poor boy. It’s stress, you know.” 

“I know. I didn’t mean-- I did. I know, stop looking at me like that, I know it wasn’t time for a lecture on office politics--” 

Outside, he can hear the Vauxhall start with a wheeze and sputter down the street. 

“Wasn’t going to say that,” Maria says. “We know where he’ll be going.” She strips her headset off, wincing as it catches in her curls, and stows it with her controller in the basket by the television. “You get the blankets and things, all right? I’ll make some cocoa.” 

“Yeah.” He goes for a towel and some of the ratty old knitted blankets that lurk in the top of the linen closet. “I didn’t mean he shouldn’t do these things. He always does the right thing.” 

“I know. And he’s always very sincere about it,” Maria calls from the kitchen. 

“And you can tell, you can really tell-- I mean, if he could turn that on all the time he’d be Captain Britain or something,” Bill frets. “But he can’t, and half the time people adore him and then the rest of the time he comes off looking like a complete bellend even when he’s right.” 

“I know.” 

“Christ, a fire extinguisher. Poor Henry. Poor ‘Aitch. We’re all fucked.” 

“Cocoa’s ready.” 

They troop out to the car, and Bill drives them to Horatio’s beach. 

Beach is maybe a strong word. Bill pulls their Mazda up beside Horatio’s old Vauxhall on the shoulder, and he and Maria trudge down the shallow slope and yellowing, wiry grass and weeds to the rocks and pebbles that constitute the beach. Horatio’s just visible out in the cold grey sea, a streak of white popping up from underneath the water now and then to breathe. They find his clothes where he’s abandoned them on one of the larger stones, and hunker down to wait and freeze.

Bill bogarts one of the blankets damn quickly, and Maria follows suit with the other, clutching the cocoa thermos, but Horatio apparently doesn’t feel the fucking freezing cold like a normal person, because he stays out there long enough that Bill starts to worry Maria’s going to have to go splashing in after him to pull him out. Bill doesn’t swim. 

Horatio does, though. Naturally and endlessly. In the summer it’s more funny than anything, how he’ll stay in the cold, cold Atlantic for an hour at a time, happy and sleek and shouting to Bill on the shore. Now, in bloody fucking October it’s a different story, and when he finally comes splashing up to shore, he’s as white as a fresh fall of snow, except where he’s blue. 

He chatters sheepishly at them, and Bill rushes over with the towel, scrubbing down his legs and arms and chest and hair, before Maria wraps the blanket she’d been wearing around his shoulders and tugs at his boxers. 

“Off,” she says. “No wet clothes. Come on, Horry, love, no hypothermia today.” 

“B-b-” he says shyly, and Bill gives Maria a chance to avert her eyes chivalrously before he strips the wet pants off Horatio deliberately, and smacks the towel around his waist. Horatio snatches for it quickly, all the tremors in his pale body vibrating down to the end of his long fingers, and Bill wraps the second blanket around him too. His nailbeds are a bluey sort of purple, and Bill chafes his long, slender hands between his own, until Horatio winces and makes a little groaning, whimpering sound, which probably means he has circulation again.

“Make a fist,” Bill says. “Then you can have cocoa.” 

He sort of can, not very tight, but his fingers are working enough to curl in, so Bill reasons he can’t be too frozen through, and Maria hands over the little lid-cup. Bill bundles up Horatio’s clothes, and nudges him with his hip. “Get in the car, you lunatic.” 

“C-can you drive mine-?” he asks, and Bill digs through his clothes to find the keys to the Vauxhall. 

Which doesn’t start. Maria knows the Vauxhall so she hasn’t left yet, just started the Mazda for the heating system, Horatio bundled in and waiting. 

Bill sees Horatio’s face melt in fresh, frustrated agony, because normally while his car not working is barely a blip on the angst radar, he’s had an awful weekend. 

“It’s all right,” Bill soothes. “I’ll ring for a tow, it’s all right.” 

Bill’s not supposed to fold into the back because of his leg, so Horatio has to get out and shuffle into the back, and they all drive home together. Bill makes Horatio drink at least half of the cocoa. 

At home, Horatio’s appetite comes on all at once, and he finally eats the squishy sandwiches Bill made for him hours ago now, and then he looks grimly, lip wobbling, at his desktop. 

“Wrong,” Bill says, and marches him to bed, stripping down to his pants and undershirt so that he can lie on him and make sure he doesn’t get up and self-flagellantly try to keep coding. Horatio sulks for five minutes, and then passes out so thoroughly that Bill can get out of bed without even stirring him. 

He doesn’t, just drowses with his arms around the lanky body until Maria tells him dinner’s done, and he stirs out to eat a serving of the shepherds pie she’s made and make some distracted conversation. Maria shoos him off after he’s done the dishes and he goes right back into Horatio’s room, taking his leg off for the night before he crawls back into bed, and throwing a protective arm over Horatio’s limp body. Maybe he’ll be able to talk him into a therapy shag tomorrow, just a soothing brothers-in-arms kind of a thing. Maybe they’ll just sleep, like hibernating bears. 

He’s a practical man. He can plan how they’re going to make things work come Monday. He’ll salvage this project-- not gracefully, not easily, but they’ll get it wrapped and out the door and then life can start going on again. 

And if anyone gives ‘Aitch any trouble about it or can’t take a hint to shut up, he’s going to go after them with a fire extinguisher himself. Winter’s coming and he can’t keep going out to sea every time he’s upset. So Bill will take steps. Manage things. And things will be all right.

* * *


	2. Horatio

Bill pulls into Ozzy and Ben’s Monday morning, just as Oz’s flipping the sign to ‘Open’. Oz waves as they drive up-- even on a morning when he wasn’t picking up his poor old car, Horatio’d be pulling in about this time, on his own or carpooling with Bill. This morning, Bill’s dropping him off is all. And it isn’t as if picking up his car from here is a rare occurrence. It’s by way of being a tradition from literally his second day in town. 

A year and a half ago he hadn’t had a flat, hadn’t had really anything except a new job title and a week off work without pay to get himself moved out of London and down to some town he’d only ever heard of because of the satellite office. He’d gotten in late on a Sunday, picked up his key from the scowling woman who ran the only hotel he’d been able to find online, and fallen asleep half-dressed. 

In the morning the Astra wouldn’t start on the first few tries, and then halfway to the office it choked with just enough warning for him to get it off the road and then wouldn’t start, full stop. 

He screamed at it for a while, in rage and despair, standing on the shoulder of the road and pouring all his frustration into the poor, innocent heap, and he knew it was his fault and he’d never really had the money to keep it maintained, too many duct-tape patches and talking the technicians in the shop down to the absolute least they could do. 

Then he’d pulled himself together and got out his mobile to find a repair shop, eyes prickling with entirely too much emotion as the sluggish connection slowly loaded his map. It had felt like an undeserved blessing when the little red pin of a mechanics’ appeared not a mile away.

It had been early spring still, and it had started to rain a few minutes into the walk. His hands and feet and nose were icicles by the time he’d staggered into the little shop, but his head was clearer for the exercise and brisk air. It hadn’t occurred to him until he was halfway there that he probably could have rung ahead, arranged for a tow, and by then he knew the walk was the least of the trouble he deserved for how poorly he’d handled the whole thing. He had a few seconds as the building came into view to worry that they’d be closed, that he should have rung after all, but the garage door was open and someone was moving around inside. 

There were two men inside, and all the horrible odours of a fully functional repair shop: petrol, exhaust fumes, motor oil, and stale, burnt coffee. Both men smiled at him, but thank God, the smiles seemed the friendly sort, and he didn’t worry too long or too much that they were laughing at him. Although he wouldn’t be surprised if they were; he knew what he must look like, freezing cold and wet through. They probably thought he was an idiot, and hell, they were right. 

“Good morning, sir,” the older of the two men said, his curly hair and close-trimmed beard grey all the way through. “Don’t you look chilled!”

“Coffee?” the other man asked, hurrying over to the little kiosk tucked in beside a vending machine on the other side of the little waiting room. “That’ll do the trick. Just boiling up the water now, we’ll get you a nice fresh cup, warm you through.” His accent was almost indecipherable; a healthy mix of what Horatio could only assume was the regional touch, and a bit of maybe Trinidad? Jamaica? It wasn't strong, just a trace, maybe a parent's accent coming through the generations-- Horatio'd been asked more than once about the hint of his mother's Welsh and his early years down in the southwest-- but between accent and nerves it took a second to connect ‘coffee’ with ‘boiling.’ 

Horatio watched with horror as the man-- young, although hard to tell what age exactly under what were truly incredible acne scars he was doing his absolute best not to stare at-- dumped a ladle full of ground espresso into a pot of boiling water and gave it a stir.

“No!” he said, overly curt from the cold and the shock. “No. No, thank you.”

“A tea man, eh? After my own heart,” the young mechanic said easily, and held up a teapot. 

“No no,” Horatio said again. “No, nothing for me, thank you. Ah-- my car.”

Both men looked for one. 

“No, it’s-- on the shoulder, about a mile back.” 

“You should have given us a ring,” the older man said, frowning. “We’d have given you a lift.” 

“It’s all right. Needed the walk,” he said, forcing a smile. “It’s a beige Vauxhall Astra. An ‘89. I’ll need to ring for a tow. The engine started to rattle right before it sort of. Stopped.” 

“Rattle. Loud?” asked the younger man. “Like, metal grinding or broken parts?” 

“No, sort of like. Gears not meshing. Clanking, not--” Horatio tried to sign it out with his hands. It didn’t work, really. 

“Alternator,” said the younger one. 

“Might be. Have to take a look.” The older man wiped his hand on a rag and stuck it out. “I’m Ben Matthews, like it says on the sign--” Horatio looked up at the lettering he’d looked at without actually reading, advertising _Ozzy and Ben’s Automotive Repair_. “That there’s Osmond Styles.” 

“Osmond,” said the younger man darkly. “Only to the inland revenue. Actual humans call me Oz.” 

“Hornblower,” Horatio said. “Uh, Horatio. Hornblower.” 

“Really? You poor bastard,” Oz said, and then “ow,” because Ben had slapped him across the back of the head. 

“You look like you were on your way to work,” Ben said, not unkindly. 

“Yes,” he said. “First day. Integrated Systems, it’s a software company-- down by the army base.”

“You won’t want to be late, then,” Ben prompted. “It’s not ten minutes away, Oz can give you a ride while we have your car towed in.” 

“I couldn’t--” he spluttered, and the younger mechanic cut him off neatly. 

“Nah, nah, no trouble. Come on, we won’t charge you much extra. Fifty, fifty-five pounds, do you think?” 

“Come off it now, Ozzy,” Ben growled. “He’s not in the mood for fun, he’s had a rough morning.” 

Oz took a second look at his face and frowned in agreement. “Only joking, Mister ‘Aitch,” he said, a bit more gently. 

Horatio twisted his fingers, angry that they were handling him as if he were on the edge of a mental breakdown, acutely aware that he needed it, which was worse. “All right,” he said, trying not to choke on it. He was familiar with all of his neuroses. The thing about filter coffee. The absolute phobic horror of putting anyone out of their way ever. It made good logical sense, what was being proposed, it was probably a way of retaining customers, but it made his stomach churn. “Is there a taxi company I should ring up, to get me back here in the afternoon?” 

“I’ll drive it out to you when you get off work, five, do you think?” Oz said cheerfully. “Assuming she’s running. You can drop me back at the shop on your way. It’ll be good to get out from under this slave driver for a half hour.” Ben rolled his eyes at this. “You’re staying at Mason Lodge?” 

That was the euphemistic name of the hotel. Horatio jerked a nod. 

“Yeah, right on your way then.” 

“How did you--”

“Only lodging in town,” Oz said with a smile. “Not a hard guess. You here for a while?”

“Yes.” Horatio looked out down so his expression wouldn’t broadcast his thoughts on that-- too loudly, at least.

“Bit of a change for you, then?” Ben asked. “Come from the City?”

“Yes,” Horatio sighed. “What gave it away?”

“Oh bless,” Oz said. “Everything, my lad. No harm done,” he winked. “We’ll have you local in no time. Tell you what, if you’ve time after work today, I’ll show you around. Give you the tour-- it’ll take, oh, about five minutes. We got the pub, the other pub, the market, the pub, the chippy, the petrol station, and us, and you’ve already seen us.”

Horatio stared, trying to figure out how to respond.

“Joking, Mister Aitch,” Oz said, kindly. “Not about the pubs, though. Or the chippy. But there’s no real market anymore, not until summer proper, just the corner shop.”

“Yes,” Horatio said. “Right, yes.” He sounded like a complete imbecile, he knew. Always did when someone teased him. He’d never gained the knack of recognising humour reliably, something which frustrated his friends endlessly, he was sure, and on a day when his nerves were already rubbed raw, he suspected he’d walk face-first into the held out pie, and then apologise to the clown for ruining his afters. 

“Pick-up’s out back,” Oz said, “come on this way, we’ll get you to work in a trick.” 

He’d followed Oz to an old pick-up, hoisting himself up to the passenger's seat, and the old thing had rattled and rumbled its way down the wet highway, the extra distance from the ground and the smell of diesel enough to make Horatio’s stomach churn.

“So you know where you’ll be staying?” Oz asked, peering out at the road. 

“No. I didn’t really have time. There was a flat I rung about on Saturday, but they left me a message this morning that they’d already filled it.” 

“You know, Mrs. Mason’s girl Maria, she’s been looking for a flatmate, since her last took off for Oxford. She’s a lovely girl, works hard. In the running group with my older sister.” 

“Do you think she’d mind a male flatmate, though?”

Oz shot him a sidelong glance, his gaze tracking up and down and then flicking back to the road ahead. “I think it’d be all right.” 

Horatio’s knuckles went white on the door handle he’d been clinging to, and he fought back a fresh wave of anger. Yes, all right, he knew what he looked like. Tall and skinny, protruding Adam’s apple, elbows and knees and too-baggy slacks, too-capacious shirt, harmless and, yes, all right, gay as a day in spring, he knew. It wasn’t anything he’d cultivated, never went for the look or adopted any mannerisms that he knew of, dressed himself like other programmers tended to dress themselves, but people just looked at him and seemed to know. If he knew what he was doing, maybe he could change it, but it would feel pointless and cheap to try to be anything but himself. 

“You look like a nice young man,” Oz offered, catching his expression. “Is what I mean.” 

Horatio was maybe three years younger than him at the outside and not open to being labeled ‘a nice young man’ at the moment. “I know what you meant.” 

“Nah, don’t take it so hard. Just got the radar, you know?” Oz rapped his temple. “Dead handy at the pub, though I suppose the young men always come to you instead of the other way around.” 

“Oh,” Horatio said, a little dumbfounded. “Sorry.” And before he could figure out what the hell the man had meant by the second half of that, the little van was lurching to a stop in front of an intimidating old building, more like a courthouse than a software office. 

“So here you are. Give us a ring around noon and we’ll be able to tell you what sort of repairs you’re looking at, and sort out your ride home.” Oz fished in one of the cup holders and produced a dog-eared business card. 

“Thank you,” Horatio said, voice a little thick. The faint smell of engine oil and the rock of the pick-up had been unpleasant, and being faced with day one of a new job reminded him why he wasn’t off at day whatever-hundred of his old, familiar job, and his stomach was twisting hard. He staggered down out of the pick-up, turned around to say something polite, and then turned back and bolted for one of the ornamental shrubs. 

He fell on his knees in the mulch and retched out nothing, just the remnants of a quick cereal bar grabbed before bed yesterday and a lot of stinging bile. 

The door of the pick-up slammed and Oz hurried up behind him, there to offer him a hand up while he looked at his feet furious at himself for being such an all-around mess. 

“Chin up, Mister Hornblower,” the mechanic told him, offering a stick of chewing gum. “It’ll be all right.” 

 

He had lasted one day into Sawyer’s reign of slightly senile terror without caffeine, and after a day like that Ozzy’s coffee hadn’t seemed like it could be any more fatal, so when Oz had driven him back to the shop that afternoon, he’d had some. And now it’s a year and a half later and he can’t really stop. The way marathon runners can’t stop, he thinks. You survive Oz’s coffee and life seems a little more precious afterwards. 

Ben’s waiting for him-- is already coming outside to stand in the doorway out of the rain as Bill drops him off, holding his keys out. 

“She’s got another few months yet. But sooner or later you’re going to have to let her go,” he says. “The Clays uptown have got their sedan out on Craigslist. I’ve worked on it once or twice, it’d give you at least five years.” 

“Thank you,” he says, never not awkward at the way the older man seems to think it’s his job to look after him, like the kindly old uncle he’d never had. “I’ll take a look.” 

Or just let it go, having one car is a pain, but it’s been survivable, and it would let him save up, and give him the necessary shove to get the chain and wheels of his bicycle fixed. He’ll have to talk to Bill. 

He knows what Bill will say, come to think of it. Bill will tell him it’s all right to let Horatio go on borrowing his car as if they’d never not co-owned it and it was perfectly all right that roughly a year and a half ago he started having to share life with him, because Bill has a strange quiet loyalty and has not, to date, refused any serious request from him. It makes him nervous. He thinks Bill may be his best friend, the best he’s ever had, which makes him feel guilty. But he always thought of Archie more as his pesky little brother. ...An adorable, shaggable little brother, granted, but someone to be mentored and protected as much as a comrade in arms. 

Bill is... is Bill, serious and solid and supportive. 

He’s very nice. And so is Maria, in her more platonic way. It makes Horatio feel completely unworthy pretty much all of the time. 

“Coffee?” Ben cuts in on his thoughts, leading him inside. “There’s a fresh batch just ready.” 

“Yes,” he says, a little too desperately, because coffee. 

“Got your invoice in the office, about the same as usual.” 

“Thank you.” He doesn’t feel grateful, he feels sulky, and feels guilty about that because he knows that Oz and Ben have gone out of their way for him more than once. 

“Should I get you a larger cup?” Ben asks, solicitously. “If you don’t mind me saying so, you’re looking more than a bit tired this morning.”

Horatio is well aware his smile is more of a grimace than anything, but he does his best. “No, thank you, Ben. Just the start of a long week.”

“Yeah. We heard there was ambulances up your way Saturday.” 

Everyone hears everything around here. Horatio manages not to wince. “There was an accident at the office. Some people were hurt, and we’re going to be... short handed for a while.” He feels guilty for the evasion, but the police told him not to say anything. That doesn’t really help, though, because he knows he wouldn’t want to tell Ben what happened, wouldn’t want his opinion of him to change, even without the excuse, and that makes him as dishonest as if he’d outrighted lied.

“Mm,” Ben says, and, “let me just go get that invoice,” and Horatio’s stomach goes cold and his face and neck hot. Ben knows. The rumours have started, and they’ve already made it here. He’s being kind about it, because he’s always been kind to Horatio, but he knows Sawyer’s in the hospital and Horatio’s the one who smacked his head into a wall.

Horatio shoves his hands into his pockets so they won’t shake, staring at the ground until Oz clears his throat, offering over a coffee cup. 

“On the house today, mate,” he booms. “I made it extra strong-- put some hairs on your chest.” He winks, and Horatio is so dismayed at the idea of Oz putting himself out and embarrassed at the reminder of his skinny chest-- compared to the rest of Oz’s clientele, he knows that he’s basically a plucked chicken-- that he just stammers. 

“No!” he manages, “no, no, nonsense, Oz, let me pay for that.”

Oz just scoffs, shooing away his wallet when he pulls it out. “None of that. Consider it a loyalty perq.” 

Horatio puts on grateful smile that he hopes looks natural. He can’t refuse without being rude, but he hates that Oz thinks he needs to be handled so delicately-- which, it’s very possible, he actually does. The gesture itself he’s sickeningly grateful for, and that just makes it harder to say, “Oh-- okay, then, thank you. Thank you very much, Oz, I--”

“Need it,” Oz laughs, and claps him on the shoulder. “You look like they’re working you to death, and it’s only Monday! Careful, or you’ll end up in as bad a shape as your car, mark me.”

Horatio doesn’t say that the holes Oz’s coffee is putting in his stomach lining are unlikely to help with those matters, and just looks awkwardly at the ground and the paper cup in his hands.

“Oh come off him, Ozzy,” Ben says, coming out of the back office with Horatio’s invoice. “What are you trying to do to the poor man? Can’t you see he has to get to work?”

Flustered, Horatio pays up his latest bill. “Thank you,” he says to both of mechanics, fiddling with his keys. 

“See you tomorrow, mate, regular time,” Oz says, and gives him a friendly smile as he leaves.

It’s not until he’s dodging puddles in the little car park that he takes the first dangerous sip of the coffee-- and stops, startled, because it has hot chocolate mix in, a cloying packaged sweetness that cuts through and helps calm the overly bitter burn. He can feel his face go red in an instant. Oz has teased him a hundred times about his refined palate and his City Boy lattes and cafe mochas, but this is generous and unprompted, and was given to him free and with affection. He feels awful.

He turns back, raises the cup to Oz’s big smile through the shop window where he’s standing, obviously waiting for Horatio to notice, and stumbles to his car. It starts. Thank God.

He drinks the whole cup dry on the drive, not caring how hot it is, not caring how he usually has to wait until he gets to the break room to drink more than a mouthful or two. The knots his imposition have caused in his gut-- had Oz had to specifically _buy_ the mix just for him-- war with how much easier it is to drink this way, and how badly he needs the caffeine. Not that his stomach isn’t already tangled this morning as it is. 

There’s no police tape or police cars in the car park when he gets to the office; they’ve been cleared to open the office like normal, no one’s rung to follow up with him yet, and he has no reason to believe he won’t be able to go to work. But he’s still waiting for someone to call him out as soon as he parks, as soon as he starts the wet trudge through the rain to the front door. 

Oldroyd, the young security guard, waves good morning at him like always. Horatio waves back awkwardly, mumbling and stumbling into the lift before Oldroyd can start to talk about the weekend. Rude, but he’s sure Oldroyd has the full story by now, and a bit of rudeness isn’t going to make his opinion of him any worse.

The office feels like it’s buzzing. Almost everyone is clustered in and around the break room. 

“Where’s Buckland?” Horatio says, a little sharply.

Oh thank God, there’s Bill, over at the sink with the teapot, pouring himself a cup. He looks up at Horatio’s voice. His face is tight, drawn at the corners of the eyes and mouth where he keeps his tension, but it relaxes a little when their eyes meet, and he hurries over, managing to look like he’s not hurrying at all. Bill’s got a solid stance and a natural grace Horatio will never, ever have and will always covet selfishly, especially when it means he stands around with his elbows and knobby knees with the entire break room staring at him and his ears turning red.

“Left about as soon as he came in. I don’t think he’ll be back.” 

“He’s dev lead. What do you mean he won’t be back?” 

“He had some kind of panic attack when he found out about Sawyer and sent a mass email about taking his annual leave starting today. I don’t think he’ll be back,” Bill repeats. 

Horatio grabs for words, finds just a monosyllable, a little huff of air like he’s taken a punch in the stomach. Bill shifts possibly subconsciously towards him, bracing him up with a big sturdy hand on the shoulder. 

“Pull what you can together. I’m going to get on the phone with the client this afternoon and get us another week.” 

“London--” 

“To hell with them,” Bill says, his voice deep and resonant and reassuring. “Really, right to hell with them, they’re lucky we’re working at all. You programmers do what you need to and I’ll dress it up in Business for them.” 

“Thanks, Bill,” Horatio says, and means it. “They’ll-- they’ll want it done more than they want to penalise us but I’m sorry it’s you that has to liaise.” 

“Nobody forced me into business school,” Bill sighs and shakes his shoulder lightly, then lets go. 

Horatio misses the warmth of his hand as soon as it’s gone, but wrapping himself bodily around Bill is both inappropriate in an office setting and not going to get anything done. He looks around at who’s left. With Wellard in the hospital, either he or Roberts has to take over the graphical interface side of things. It’ll probably be Roberts, Horatio’s been told that his interfaces look like they’ve been designed by and for Asimovian robots. It’s just finishing left, anyway, just polish. 

Wolfe will handle some of it, too, because he hates doing more work than his job description allows for but he does understand that the project has to get wrapped. He can do minor bug fixes as well as bug reports. 

And Horatio will get almost no sleep, but-- guiltily-- he’s almost pleased. Without Buckland breathing down his neck, with the ability to halfway manage his processes, he can slip into the project and get it working. They can do beta in a week. It’s not a particularly wild project, it’s just a fleet tracking system is all, those are practically off the shelf nowadays. Current product tech support will hate him for a little while but if he rolls out patches in a timely fashion things can limp right on. 

He deletes Buckland’s email without reading it and sends his own with the revised development plan, such as it is. Everyone checks in by noon-- at least one of Wolfe’s team comes to get some clarification on how much rework he’s actually asking them to do, and everyone seems to be looking at him, God knows why. 

It can’t last, they’ll all remember he’s just a random programmer like them sooner or later, but while it does he takes ruthless advantage to get everyone organized up, hammer out a new timeline for Bill to sell London, and then plunge headfirst into debugging and finishing the last stray subroutines they’d been leaving. 

He looks up and it’s four in the afternoon; he goes for a drink out of the machine, passing the teleconference room where Bill is sitting alone with the speakerphone and telling the Dominican with complete sincerity that _despite the tragic incident, we have every confidence that product can still be delivered next Monday--_ as if it’s not a week later than agreed to just a few days ago, and it’s really masterful stuff and it’s probably immensely stressful. 

Guilt. Horatio optimises some vehicle status reporting subroutines instead of letting it eat him. 

The lights go off, which means it’s seven in the evening, and there’s a big warm presence in his cubicle, a faint warmth on the top of his head and shoulders, a mutter of syllables that don’t register until he comes to a stopping point a few minutes later. 

The backlog of his brain processes through and is assembled into actual memories. Bill was here: came to say he was going home, told him not to stay too late, squeezed his shoulders and kissed the top of his head in his sort of fraternal sort of shaggable way, and let him be. 

He glances at the clock: seven thirty. He’ll stay till eight. 

He glances at the clock a few minutes later, and it’s nine pm. At some point after that, he winds up in bed, but it’s sort of a blur and he dreams he’s still driving home from the office until his alarm goes off and Bill pops his head in. 

 

On Tuesday more of a casualty list gets assembled. Buckland; holiday leave has been upgraded to medical leave, implicitly psychiatric, transfer to follow. Clive; ‘sabbatical’, implicitly drying out at some expensive facility somewhere, probably going to resign after this. But the writing’s been on the wall for them for ages, is the general feeling. Everyone wants to know about Henry and Sawyer. 

An email from hwellard5@gmail.com is in Horatio’s inbox on Wednesday morning, timestamp of midnight; he forwards it to everyone whose addresses Henry couldn’t remember, and then actually reads it.

>   
> _yea im in the hospital im okay no word when ill be out_
> 
> _yu all have to sign my neckbrace_
> 
> _all my work backed up on the srver under personal folder_
> 
> _more details when the police say OK_
> 
> _-Henry Wellard  
>  This message was sent from an iPhone_

“Last I heard they had him on muscle relaxants,” says Silk, one of Wolfe’s guys. “Is it true Sawyer was strangling him?” 

Yes. Yes it is true that Sawyer had been strangling the poor kid, that Horatio’d heard the crash and Sawyer’s voice speaking in low threatening tones and Henry, poor dumb Henry who’d just wanted to come in and try to get the teleconference stuff working and work on his end of the project, he’d shouted, and Horatio had heard his voice just choke off suddenly. 

Horatio had run in, had seen Sawyer standing huge and strong like the young man he must have been once and his hand around Henry’s neck, and then he’d dropped or really thrown Henry across the conference table and ripped the fire extinguisher off the wall outside with shaking hands-- 

And adrenaline had made the solid old man feel so light when Horatio ripped him away and dragged him out of the conference room, one part of his brain noting the broom closet would be easy to wedge until Sawyer stopped being insane, that part of his brain had been all logical and ticking, another had been furious and clouded in a pink mist, and he’d had to use his whole body weight to shove Sawyer through the door and he _thinks_ he’s almost sure that he didn’t mean to smash the old man’s head against the doorframe as he went but he knows, he does know, that he didn’t care that it had happened, that he slammed the door shut and wedged it as best he could with a chair and went back to Wellard 

He’s pretty sure that he didn’t intend to hurt Sawyer. Mostly sure. 

He’s one-hundred percent sure that he needs to forget that awful Saturday and people need to stop asking him about it. 

“I’m not supposed to talk about it,” Horatio says crisply. 

“Still, the little guy’s pretty coherent for being on the good stuff. Tough little scrapper,” Silk says approvingly. 

They find out that a new office manager's been appointed, starting next week. They don’t know who and they don’t know when, but the guessing game starts and the rumours are buzzing around like mosquitoes.

Horatio tries not to feel guilty and horrible and horribly guilty, and buries himself in lines of code and making sure his team and Wolfe’s group are updating the workflows and aren’t running into problems they can’t handle and keeping Bill in the loop, until Bill shows up Wednesday night at half ten with a lukewarm pizza and a refusal to let him do anything more but get in the car and be driven home.

They’re back in the office by seven Thursday morning. It’s a quiet day; everyone’s drawn and focused, and Bill’s doing a run down to Ozzy and Ben’s every few hours, because they’re all feeling it. Horatio’s bin has three coffee cups in by noon.

Hobbs shows up halfway through the lunch hour. He looks almost as tired as Horatio feels.

“Sawyer’s awake. Lucid,” Hobbs says shortly, as he’s swarmed for details. “The senior partners have been speaking to him. Nobody’s pressing charges. He’s issued a formal apology to Wellard and he’ll be taking a retirement.” 

And that’s all they get; everything else gets a stony silence from him, which means people keep coming back to Horatio because he was there. 

He has his theories, of course. Paranoid schizophrenia is his top contender after a bit of surreptitious wiki-diving, but he’s not actually a doctor and being threatened with a blunt object and snarled at by someone who was looking at him from thirty years in the past through a filter of Red panic is not a prime time to make an accurate diagnosis. 

It’s Roberts who pushes him too far, the poor solid workhorse, and he rears back as Hornblower jerks to his feet and his desk chair roles back and fetches up against his cubicle wall. 

“We don’t have time to gossip. We are two programmers short, we have an exec missing, and we still have a deadline. By the grace of God and Bill Bush that deadline is in four days instead of having passed three days ago,” he roars, loud enough for the whole office to stop working and stare. “If you absolute wankers can’t do your jobs, you will at least let me do mine. If I see one more conversation about the incident that is stopping work, if I am _involved_ in one more, I will personally have you out of the damn building.” 

He closes his mouth with a snap, and then has to try to unlock his jaws. Oh Christ they’re all staring at him, he’s raving like he’s mad himself. 

“You have two choices,” he says to everyone, trying to salvage his dignity. “Work. Or go home. Nobody will blame you for leaving this sinking ship, but don’t make it miserable for those of us who are going down with it. _Gentlemen_.” 

He sits back down, scrabbles in his drawer for his big headphones, shoves them into the jack on his monitor, and stares at his screen, trying not to hyperventilate. He ignores the figures that pause at his cubicle entrance, until one of them comes in, kneels heavily down beside him with a faint metallic clink, and turns out to be Bill. 

“Has anyone gone home or are they just sitting in the breakroom talking about how crazy I am?” he whispers. 

Bill stares at him, shakes his head. “Are you kidding? That was amazing. They’re all heads down in their computers. You made me want to get back to coding and you know I don’t speak a word of perl.”

“Bill, you’ve done so much already--” 

“I’ve done sweet fuck all that matters today and yesterday. Just running for coffee since Wellard’s out.” Bill sighs. “Oh, ‘Aitch. You amazing tone deaf bastard, you aren’t listening to anything, are you?” 

“You don’t know that,” Horatio snaps. 

Bill reaches up and takes the headphone plug out of the microphone jack, puts it into the output jack, and Horatio can’t help but give a strangled little laugh. He really is physically incapable of being more of a screw-up. 

“I won’t let’m pester you. Don’t worry.” Bill smiles at him, blue eyes twinkling, and Horatio spares some time to be grateful that Bill puts up with all of his ridiculousness. 

Bill must have done some kind of black magic-- or wasted some time looming around his cubicle-- because he’s left alone except for a few efficient, sensible questions. He probably doesn’t get more done than he has all week, but it feels that way when things start coming together, everything they’ve been working on since Monday beginning to join up into a final, functional project. 

Bill reappears a few hours later with a big warm hand squeezing his shoulder, pulling him up from under the swamp of code code code code code and making him think with words and proper English sentences again. “Hey there,” he says, and waits until Horatio’s taken his headphones off. “It’s just gone half four. I told everyone to wrap up and get me their documentation and get out of here. I’m going to the chippy-- what do you want?”

He won’t let Horatio refuse, and comes back with some slightly soggy chips and a box of mixed fish pieces and shrimp, and it’s just them working for the next little while, a few cubicles away, everything smelling like grease and chips and the mushy peas Bill binned. It’s nice, in a way, and Horatio knows the only reason Bill’s giving up his evening is to keep him company, and he feels terrible about that, but he’s selfish enough that he still enjoys it, the quiet, Bill’s solid efficiency, the flicker of another monitor in his peripheral vision, the way things aren’t absolutely awful.

The new email notification pops up on the bottom of his screen, and he’s got a minute while he’s waiting for the tester programme to load, and he’s not important enough to get many after-hours emails, so he flicks over to his inbox. It’s from Henry, no subject line, sent to everyone Henry sent the last one to too.

>   
> _hey so yeah im famous_
> 
> _http://queennotorious/blog/2012/10/royal-proclamation-237/#more_
> 
> _atograph lines out back.a fiver each_
> 
> _-Henry Wellard  
>  This message was sent from an iPhone_

That’s all there is. Horatio clicks on the link, confused; he’s even more confused when the page loads, the style sheets before the content. The header’s Queen Victoria, except that what was once a black and white image has been coloured in to look like some sort of glam rocker, and an embellished script typeface flourishes around her in an arc that reads _Queen Notorious_.

There aren’t many side links, just a calendar and an email button and a shop. Not even Twitter or Facebook. As soon as the entry loads, he can tell it’s a blog. There aren't any images, so it’s not about travel or cooking; just dark words on a cream background.

>   
> **Royal Proclamation CCXXXVII -- On The Proper Handling Of Interns and other Beaſts of Burden**
> 
> _Notorius, R._
> 
> _WHEREAS it has come to Our attention that AN AFFRAY occurred in Our Offices of_ NowheresfordShire _, we feel Ourſelves Called to diſpenſe Our wiſdom._
> 
> _The junior programmer is a Brute Animal that muſt remain broken and cannot be allowed to take on Airs; offenſes to be ſwiftly corrected are - remaining ſilent - ſpeaking - attempting to work - not working - being abſent - being underfoot._
> 
> _Any blunt object will Do in the event that a Junior Programmer offends. We heartily congratulate Lord Senior Executive for his prompt uſe of a Fire Extinguiſher._
> 
> _We Note with diſapproval that the J.P. has been given a ſettlement, and We urge the Board to return to their previous Commendable Attitude of treating anyone with a pay packet under Six Digits in length as if they were Not Human in the Slighteſt._
> 
> _\- Given at Our Court in Corporatania, the fifth day of_ October _, two thouſand and twelve, in the Fifth Year of Our Reign_
> 
> **God Save the Queen**

“Oh my God,” Bill says from his desk. “Wellard _is_ famous.”

“But the long s went out before Victoria,” Horatio objects automatically, because the typeface is bothering him.

“Well, Queen Victoria went out before glam rock,” Bill says reasonably. “Have you ever heard of this blog before?” He starts clicking. “Wow, it’s been going on since ‘07.”

Horatio rereads the post. How had this person found out about Saturday? Well, the whole town seemed to have heard the story in a matter of hours. Maybe it wasn’t so hard to believe word had spread farther. And there are over a hundred comments on the entry, so lord knows how far it’s spread at this point. 

A shiver of ice locks up his shoulders, and his stomach clenches, threatens to turn inside out right there. Oh fuck. Oh fuck fuck fuck. How many people know what _he_ did? 

He reads the entry again, so quickly he can barely process the words. There’s no mention of him. No mention of anyone other than the alluded to Sawyer and Wellard. He starts sucking in air through his nose, fixing his face in a smile to try and stop himself from being sick while he control-f’s for “Horatio,” “Hornblower,” “Sawyer,” “Wellard,” and “concussion,” turning up nothing, before he lets the smile fade and tries to think if there’s anything else he can search for. As far as he can tell, no one’s shared his information in the comments. Yet.

There are a few ‘related’ links under the main story-- they go to more unsubtly ironic posts about other corporate nastiness, none quite as overtly awful, many worse after consideration. Tricks to deny medical leave and pensions. Ducking laws. Pillaging ex-employee’s design work. The usual horror stories that are cathartic to some programmers in the office and just terrify him and make his stomach go to acid. Some of these sound like incidents from the main offices, but they’re so vague there’s no being sure if it’s focused on their company or if it’s some kind of aggregate. The fire extinguisher-- that’s Wellard, it has to be. This one about using mat leave to deny health benefits... that could be anywhere. People are awful. He notes that the tone and the faux-historic tics in the text are consistent all the way through: one writer collecting all of the stories, at least. 

Bill snorts to himself. “Some of these are really funny,” he says. “God, people are shit. Oh wow, look at the comments count on this one-- um, April 12, 2008. ‘The Mythical Beast, the Good Servant.’ Don’t try to read them all, ‘Aitch.”

Horatio clicks through the calendar until he gets to the entry; Bill’s right, there are over a thousand comments. The first’s from the day it was posted, the last’s from only yesterday. They’re all generally positive, a few even with correct grammar and spelling, a few vitriolic and nonsensical, some spam. A couple reference where they were linked from-- all over the place, best he can tell. This blog has way too large an audience for his comfort. Christ, he hopes it doesn’t fuck up Wellard’s settlement.

“‘Further proof of the hopeless nature of _Our_ search to find a _Good Servant_ must lay in the _Nature_ of the _Servant_ : to have a lack of _Clairvoyancy_ and an incapacity to understand what one means rather than one says, most characteristic of the _Serving Class_ ,” Bill says, affecting the most posh of the accents he’d learned in speech class at uni, dramatically over-enunciating the random historic-ish capitals. “We having required _Our Own Assistant_ to order us a brown Serta Executive Class Desk Chair, were naturally expecting a Brookstone reclining chair in black. The impertinent and _Lazy Servant_ meanwhile procured us the Serta in _Brown_ , earning our most deserved wrath. This follows on the heels of his having several times misinterpreted _Our Reasonable Request_ for a cold spiced tea beverage, which we quite plainly referred to as a Peppermint Latte. He then had the _Very Cheek_ to imply that we meant an iced Chai and insisted upon this name instead of the other names _We_ have _Condescended_ to give it, such as Cappuccino and London Fog’. Ha. This isn’t half bad.” 

“It’s not clever. It’s just awful stories dressed up in a bad font. Don’t you have actual work to do?” Horatio says, a little too sharply, and then there’s a ringing silence as Bill goes quiet in that particular way he does when Horatio gets a particular kind of snappy. 

Horatio is briefly pleased with himself: he knows that at some level, Bill’s newfound enthusiasm for the blog has a lot to do with Wellard being in it. Bill likes this kind of public attention. He likes famous people, he keeps a space in his head for the things they’re up to. The last time there was really much household tension was when Bill was tying up the set all weekend because some of the royals were getting married.

The satisfaction lasts an entire second before he has to admit to himself that a slightly annoying tendency to celebrity gossip and caring about famous people doesn’t mean he deserves to be used as Horatio’s verbal punching bag when it’s Horatio’s own failings he’s really upset about. And rubbing it in when Bill’s already feeling awkward about not being able to help is just shitty of him all ‘round and God he wishes he could keep his mouth shut all the time.

“...sorry, Bill.” 

“Nah. S’fine,” Bill says, cheerfully. He’s faking it. 

“Bookmark a few good ones. I’ll read them tonight.” 

“Sure. Right.” He isn’t going to; he’s going to drop it like this never happened and go on being big, bluff, supportive Bill. Horatio can hear it in his voice. 

God, he’s such an asshole. He won’t be surprised the day Bill finally has enough and stops talking to him. He stares at the blog for a few seconds, then stabs the web browser shut before he learns to associate the nauseated feeling of guilt with the visual layout. He flips over to his work and buries himself again. 

It’s a productive evening after that, lots of open-ends closing, linking up, and he works them through to nine. He expected Bill to leave around seven like he has been, but he stays where he is, plugging away at his own computer. At home, Bill makes pasta, and Horatio prints out one of the Notorious blogs on his crappy little inkjet and asks Bill to read it for him, with the voices. Bill looks so chuffed it makes Horatio’s chest hurt; Maria thinks it’s hilarious and makes Bill read two more before he goes to bed and she settles down to Halo with some of her friends. Horatio falls asleep on the settee with his head in her lap while she hurls abuse at someone on the other side of the television screen, the rattle of simulated gunfire almost like white noise. 

 

Friday starts off all right. They have a quick status meeting amongst themselves in the morning, informal and brief, and he picks apart some dodgy subroutines and looks over Robert’s latest work for a few hours. He can hear the chatter about Wellard’s email and the Notorious blog making the rounds, but it’s quiet, nondisruptive, and work is happening around it instead of stopping for it. His face instantly goes red when he remembers how he’d spoken to Roberts and everyone yesterday, and he sticks his headphones on to drown out the conversations and give the necessary social cue so no one will try to involve him in one. The less he says, the better. 

He’s eating a cereal bar and tapping out an email telling everyone to update him and Bill with where they are and what still needs to get done before four this afternoon when the new message pops up in his inbox. It’s not from Wellard this time. The subject line is automated, an internal system-generated one from HR, a new posting in their office. He’s gotten so far as moving the cursor over to mark it as Read After Monday when he sees that the generator code’s a higher level than comes with his position, and that it’s been forwarded to him by one Ed Pellew. 

The name shakes him out of his machine state, just because it’s confusing, and because he has memories associated with it from when he worked the London office. Pellew hadn’t been chief financial yet, he’d been a senior project manager, competent and actually good at managing, and Horatio worked with his team during his probationary period. 

Notable mostly because, ha ha, the crush he had had on the man could have leveled buildings. 

He opens the mail, frowns at it confused until he parses the stiff formulaic language-- it’s Buckland’s job they’re trying to fill, they’re looking for a new development lead. A higher level position like this they’ll try to fill internally first, of course, get someone who’s familiar with products and workflow inside the company. What it’s doing in his inbox is the next question. 

He sends the email to the printer. He’ll look at it later, maybe something will pop out in hardcopy that isn’t obvious on screen. Right now it just looks like an internal job posting. He briefly considers throwing a resume in with everyone else who’ll be scrabbling, futile as that will be given his attachment to this failing project. 

Bill brings him the sheet a half hour later, and he swears internally because he’d promised himself he was going to stop relying on Bill to rescue things sent to the printer by absent minded programmers and abandoned. But Bill doesn’t have a lecture. There’s a serious look in his eye. 

“You’re submitting a resume for this, right?”

“Wha-- I didn’t think-- Roberts has at least two more years experience than I do--” he immediately starts to deflect.

“No harm putting your name in,” Bill tells him. “Do you have a recent one?” 

“Ah,” he says. “Pretty recent.” He tries to keep it updated as he goes. He hasn’t done anything new since this project started, at least, and that was the last time he went over it. “But I didn’t think--”

“Yeah, maybe leave this particular chapter off and pretend it isn’t recent. But you’ve got to get one in. You’re overdue for this,” Bill says implacably. “And this is from Ed Pellew. He _knows your name_. I didn’t know he knew any of us from a hole in the ground. That’s amazing.” 

“I did some work on one of his projects a few years ago,” Horatio says uncomfortably. “I have no idea why he sent me the mail-- maybe he’s got a list of likely names and blind copied it out to all the level-twos who could fill it, they must want someone fast.” 

“You think?” Bill looks at him skeptically. “Maybe he remembers you.” 

“God, I hope not. I didn’t do anything impressive on that project-- mostly cleanup work and documentation and mooning around with a great damn crush on him like an idiot.” He can feel his ears going red. “No, Bill, he doesn’t remember me.”

He hopes. 

“Maybe he’s seen your name on the documentation we’re churning out this week. But turn around, go back, I had no idea you’d worked closely enough with him to develop a great damn crush.” Bill’s lowered his voice to a gossip tone, and he only grins when Horatio flashes him a cold glare. “Tell.” 

“I was young and new in the company and he was impressive, all right? He had, I don’t know, big hands and a nice voice, and he was _masterful_.” Horatio puts enough sarcasm into the word to try to distance himself from that ridiculous little infatuation. He’d been a complete idiot about it, unable to string words together in meetings, unable to keep his eyes off the man. Thank God he’s over that. “Wipe that smile off your face, Bush, or I’ll wipe it off for you.” 

“Sir yes sir,” Bill says, grinning harder. “Get that resume in, all right?” 

He’d argue, but Bill’s chucking him on the shoulder and heading out with a deliberate stride, and he’s happy to let the conversation go.

Around lunch he’s down to documentation and re-compiling something after an eleventh-hour change request from Wolfe, and realizes he’s got at least half an hour where he can’t touch anything useful. There’s no reason not to submit his resume and a stiff, formal cover letter through the internal jobs system. No reason except embarrassment and not liking to put himself out there, but thinking of Bill’s serious face he fights through that. 

It’s stressful enough that when he hears Bill behind him he snaps: “Resume’s in, leave me alone.” 

Then he realizes it can’t be Bill, because there wasn’t the faint metallic click on the left step, but his brain is far too late on that detail. Someone, very much not Bill at all, clears their throat. 

“I’m heading out to the hospital after work. I was wondering if you would too: Sawyer was asking to see you,” Hobbs says calmly. “Good luck on your job application, Mister Hornblower.” 

Fuck.

Update emails start trickling in around three, and he and Bill burn through the next hour and some hammering out the workflow for the next three days. He can’t expect the rest of the team to give up their weekend, not after the week they’ve had, but he’s fairly certain that he can tie together most of the pieces for Monday morning.

“‘Aitch,” Bill gives him a dubious look. “You need to give yourself some time off. You can’t work the whole weekend through.”

“I’ll go home early Monday, all right? After we’ve delivered.” 

“Aitch--” Bill sighs, giving in. “I’ll come in with you Saturday. I’ll do the paperwork, no arguing.”

The wave of gratitude is overwhelming. He hates the levels of duplicate documentation, but they’re a necessary evil, and the programmers are supposed to do most of it, it’s not Bill’s job to play secretary. “You don’t have to do that.” Guilt follows-- he’s using Bill inexcusably this week, but he just couldn’t do this without him. Just couldn’t.

“No arguing,” Bill repeats, and saves their work. “I’m going to go chase down Wolfe for those scripts before he leaves.” 

Horatio gets back to work. About twenty minutes later, he registers voices-- a lot of voices, all talking at once, loud enough to get through his headphones. He squashes his initial irritation; no matter what Bill said, he’s still humiliated about his flap yesterday. Just because it’s been a stressful week, it’s no excuse to lose his temper. He’s neither a toddler, nor anyone’s boss. 

He stops abruptly, awkwardly, when he gets out in the little hallway outside his cubicle and sees the crowd of people at the entrance from the actual hall, clustered around Wellard. 

Wellard looks terrible. Always a fine testament to a British summer, he’s gone grey and yellow and under the normal pale, and there are green-tinged bruises running all the way up his throat and chin from under his neckbrace, where it’s peeking out from the collar of his jumper. He just... looks terrible. And okay. Better than he did Saturday last. But terrible. There’s a woman behind him, Horatio’s never seen her before, but he knows instantly she’s Mrs. Wellard, Henry’s mum. She’s got the same black hair, the same narrow nose, the same jaw.

Horatio hovers awkwardly, a few feet from the edge of the group. He’s not sure if he should push forward-- there’s hardly any room around Henry to even say hello, and really, he’s starting to think he should just go back to his desk instead of putting the poor lad through this. God knows he wouldn’t want to see the man to who’d almost let him get killed. 

Henry seems to be holding up okay under the barrage of questions, but everyone on the floor seems to be here, even Wolfe, who’s usually out the door at four o'clock on the nose, and he’s barely made it more than a few steps into the cubicles. 

“All right, clear off now!” There’s Bill, voice raised, pushing through the swarm from the other direction. “Give the lad some room!” Horatio grits his teeth. He should have thought about that. “Come on, Silk,” Bill snaps. “He’s got enough trouble without you herd of hackers running him down, let him in!” 

He glares, and that’s the ticket, the crowd shifting back until Henry and his mother can get down the hall, heading for Henry’s desk, Bill behind them. “Good afternoon, Henry,” Bill says, once he doesn’t have to shout, and Henry ducks his chin as much as he can with the neckbrace. Not very much. “Mrs. Wellard? Lovely to meet you; I’m Bill--.”

“Horatio!” Henry’s face splits in a wide smile the moment he sees him, cutting off Bill and his mother’s run at manners, and Horatio’s stomach turns over. 

He knows how sick and grim his smile looks, but the muscles in his face have gone limp and numb and he can’t do a thing with them. “Henry,” he says. “You’re looking well.” Oh Jesus, he’s as stiff as a corpse. 

“Mum, Mum,” Henry says. “This is Horatio Hornblower.”

She gives him a look, startled and then grateful, her expression so open he wants to turn on his heel and run. 

“Henry’s told me all about what you did,” she says, and the rest of the office is nodding, and he swallows. He didn’t do anything. He got in a fight with a crazy old man and hurt him badly, reacting on brainless fear. If they knew how close he came to pissing his pants they’d understand that there’s nothing admirable about how he reacted. “Thank you,” she says, and steps forward to press his hand between his. He thinks he’s going to sickup. “Thank you, so much.”

He fish-mouths at her for a second. “Ah--” he says. “No, no. Not at all. I.” He can’t keep meeting her eyes, not when he’s lying to her. He doesn’t know what she thinks he’s done, but he knows it can’t be accurate. 

“He’s only alive because of you,” she says fiercely. “Thank you, Mister Hornblower.” She’s still holding his hand. His stomach is this close away to making him bolt. 

“He was very brave,” Horatio babbles. “He’s a clever, brave young man.” Henry’d been flailing and scrabbling at Sawyer even with Sawyer’s hands around his throat, kicking even when stunned and Sawyer was smashing at him with that damn fire extinguisher. 

“Should we go to your desk, Henry?” Bill asks, sliding in like a gentle, solicitous conversational shark. Mrs. Wellard lets go of his hands, and Horatio sort of sags backwards, staring at his feet. 

“Of course,” Mrs. Wellard says. “I’m so sorry, love,” to Henry, “I shouldn’t be keeping you on your feet.”

Henry blushes, and it makes the bruises on his neck and chin stand out garishly. “I’m all right, Mum,” he mumbles, and Horatio realises now how strained and sore-sounding his voice is. “I’m-- ah.” He glances up at Horatio, embarrassed. 

“Can I get you anything, Mrs. Wellard?” Bill’s asking, whether to keep her distracted while Henry talks to Horatio or because Bill has expectations and manners pressed into his genetic make up, Horatio doesn’t know. “Some tea?”

“Oh, that would be lovely,” Mrs. Wellard says, and with a quick glance to Henry-- who folds down into his desk chair obediently-- she follows Bill to the breakroom.

They watch them go, and Horatio leans awkwardly against Henry’s little filing cabinet. 

“Can you hand me that box?” Henry points to a mostly empty file box beside Horatio. He tosses the the few papers inside onto the far side of his desk, and balances it on his knees. “Thanks. ...I’m here to get my stuff,” he says, and pulls open a desk drawer, loading up the energy drinks he pulls out into the box, awkwardly bending at the waist. 

He probably shouldn’t be doing that, and Horatio hurries over to hold the box for him.

“I’m quitting,” Wellard continues, voice low enough that Horatio can only hear him because he’s right beside him, leaning in to help him shuffle through his drawers. “I’m going home with Mum until this comes off,” he gestures awkwardly at his neckbrace. “But I’m not coming back after. I just-- I can’t. This place. Even if the next manager’s not fucking crazy-- Sorry, I’m not supposed to say that. Even if he’s not as bad as Sawyer. I’m going to another company. I wish I hadn’t emailed everyone the link to that Queen N post. This is all anyone’s going to remember about me anyway.”

“No, no,” Horatio says, then, “I mean, no, everyone’s going to remember you and the work you did, too. And yes, of course, why would you want to stay here?” he adds, and shifts to take the dogeared C++ guide and R2D2-shaped thumbdrive Henry hands over. “No, no, of course. You should never have been treated so poorly.” 

He should have put a stop to it. He’d grown so complacent to Sawyer’s reign of terror that even when Sawyer was so out of line a child could have been able to tell, he’d been too cowardly to speak up, to spare Henry the wrath of Sawyer’s paranoia and imagined slights. The dressing down they’d been subjected to, after the status meeting last Thursday... he should have said something then, not just stood woodenly while Sawyer accused them of colluding with every foreign nation from the French to the Chinese, while he mocked their competence and age and basic bodily functions. Oh this is all his fault.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I should have done something. I’ve let you down.”

“No!” Henry says, and looks appalled. “I wouldn’t have lasted as long as I did without you! You’re amazing, don’t say that. Lord.”

Oh Christ, he is going to sickup. He is actually going to sickup, right here, all over the carpet. 

“I thought you would be angry,” Henry adds, shamed, “when I told you. I thought you would blame me for leaving.”

“What, Henry, no.” Right here. All over the carpet. Maybe he’ll make it to the bin if he lunges. “No, no. You deserve better than how you were treated-- so much better-- and better than this.” 

Better than whatever rumours would follow him around forever, through his probation and into his official roles, and possibly from office to office, if he didn’t break and get somewhere where no one knew that he’d been the poor junior programmer some senile old office manager had tried to beat to death with a fire extinguisher. And Christ, with that blog post out there-- everyone here knows that’s about Wellard. It has to have spread to the other offices by now, everyone knows someone in London or Edinburgh or Dublin or wherever. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.

“Yeah?” Henry meets his gaze shyly, and he tries to look encouraging instead of moments away from retching. “You should too,” Henry says, all in a rush, emboldened. “You shouldn’t stay here. They don’t appreciate the work you’re doing-- seriously, you’re the best I’ve ever seen.”

“I’m--” oh God, his stomach has frozen over but at least that means he won’t lose his lunch. “Thank you.” Saying ‘thank you’ stops people from arguing or elaborating. Mostly. Maria occasionally twists the knife. “But. You know. I’m going to see this out, a little longer. The project’s winding down, we’ll see if they break the group up. But I have to see it out,” he repeats stupidly.

“Wow. You’re really loyal. They don’t deserve you.” 

He isn’t, though. He’s just afraid to go looking, not knowing what kind of recommendation he could possibly get. He’s fantasized about laying waste to the company servers with a well placed script more than once, he just moves past it. He’s not loyal, not really. 

“Be. Be all right, right, Henry? Email us all, keep us updated.” 

“I will. Thanks for everything, Horatio.” He smiles wistfully. “Sign my brace?” 

“Ah. Sure.” 

He fumbles for a marker in Henry’s things, scribbles out a quick H. Hornblower, because it’s an unwieldy enough name even with the first half abbreviated to H-Dot. Everyone else wants in now, and he passes over the marker and smiles at Wellard and nods and bolts for the toilets. 

After, he’s brushing his teeth at the sink when Hobbs comes in, nods curtly to him, and does his business. 

“I’m going over to hospital now,” Hobbs says, washing his hands. “The visiting hours are until nine tonight.”

Fuck. Fuck. Right. His stomach does a barrel roll but there’s nothing left in it. 

He nods jerkily. “Is there a good time for me to come?”

“Not too late. After work.”

He can always come back, finish up after the visit. “Right. See you then.”

 

Bill thinks it’s a terrible idea, and makes that perfectly clear the whole time he’s driving to the hospital. 

“He has no right to ask this of you,” he reminds Horatio. “You probably shouldn’t be doing this. What if the police decide to press charges after all? This is going to do you no good, ‘Aitch.” His honest face creases with worry. 

“I gave him a concussion,” Horatio says. “He deserves to talk to me.” 

“He deserved the concussion,” Bill says hotly. 

“Did he? Really? He deserved a concussion because I couldn’t get past a sense of social impropriety and get him medical attention before he assaulted someone?” 

“You! You’re his fucking employee, not his keeper. _Hobbs_ knew this whole damn time and let it go because it was his precious job on the line if he did anything.” 

“Yes, and since I didn’t have anything to lose, I should have--” Bill has one eye on the road but is darting increasingly worried, increasingly frequent glimpses at him, and Horatio gets the sudden flash of them wrecking if he can’t keep his mouth shut. “It’ll just be a few minutes, I’m not staying long.” 

Bill leaves it at that-- begrudgingly, shooting glances at Horatio the whole rest of the trip. But he doesn’t crash the car, and doesn’t force them to keep speaking, just pulls into a spot on the kerb when they get there.

“You want me to come?”

Oh God, yes. “No, it’s okay. I’ll be back soon.”

 

Sawyer looks ghastly, lying on the hospital mattress, hemmed in by the aluminum side rails. Pale and tired, his white hair going shaggy against his pillow. He is lucid, frighteningly lucid, has that expression that twinges Horatio’s instincts to brace for a sudden talking to. But they aren’t at the office, and Sawyer can’t get up and walk around, unless he’s willing to do so in one of those open-back hospital gowns. 

“Mister Hornblower.” He smiles, humorless and awful. “Mister Hobbs tells me that young Mister Wellard was in the office this afternoon. How is he?” 

“Better, sir.” He wants to stop saying ‘sir’. This isn’t his employer anymore. He doesn’t have to. But Sawyer’s formality lifts him along. “He’s quitting.” 

“Good! Good.” There’s a flash of what may be regret, what is definitely, actually self recrimination. Sawyer rallies, gets his face back into the usual disdain. “He has some brains after all. And yourself, are you leaving?” 

“No,” Horatio says, defensive all over again. “I have work to do.” 

“More fool you, Mister Hornblower,” Sawyer sneers at him. “Never be loyal to a corporation, boy. It won’t be loyal to you.” 

He bites the inside of his cheek, says nothing. There’s no reply to a truism anyway. 

“You gave me a concussion, you know.” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“Well done. I didn’t think you had the spine. You must have enjoyed it.” 

“No, sir,” Horatio says, with complete honesty. “I didn’t enjoy anything about that afternoon.” 

“It must give you some satisfaction--” the word is poisonous, “--to see your wicked manager reduced to this, at least. Waiting for a diagnosis and a quiet lonely epilogue in some home for mad old men.” 

“No. It doesn’t, actually.” Horatio finds a well of outrage in him, enough to break through his guilt and unease. “I don’t like seeing people hurt. I don’t like it here, it gives me absolutely no pleasure to think about awful things happening to anyone, not even abusive, selfish bastards like you. _Sir_.” 

“Oh, a pair of testicles as well as a spine. Two extraordinary discoveries today.” Sawyer looks into his face, scowling at what he finds. “You really don’t find any pleasure in this, do you? You don’t even have it in you to gloat. No, you’d be above that, wouldn’t you,” Sawyer says bitterly, and sags back, shutting his eyes. “Listen, boy. The company has no use for your department anymore. Hammond will do his damnedest to see you shuffled off somewhere else as easily as you were shuffled to us, if he doesn’t lay you all off outright. There: now I’ve warned you. It’s as much as you deserve.” A long moment of silence, where he waits for Horatio to respond, and scoffs dismissively at the silence, eyes still shut. “You’d better leave now.”

“I’m pleased we agree on something, sir.” It’s so unnecessarily catty, so unfair, it’s not Horatio’s dignity that needs to be preserved now: he hates himself for it instantly. He stands stiffly and turns, meets Hobbs coming back in with a canvas bag of something that smells savory. 

The PA looks between Horatio and Sawyer, worried, and then forces on a smile with a last suspicious look at Horatio. 

“Got some supper. The canteen’s trying to pass cardboard off for parmesan again so I went out for real Italian, sorry about the wait.” 

Sawyer’s eyes crack, his expression startled, and he can’t wipe the uncertainty off of his face as he says: “Guy?” 

Hobbs visibly steels himself. “That’s right. Visiting you in the hospital.” There’s the faintest stress on the last three words.

“Don’t be coy, man, I know where I am,” Sawyer says. “What are you doing here?” 

Hobbs lifts the bag, confused. “Supper. You can’t eat that slop from downstairs.” 

Horatio backs for the door, ignored by Sawyer and encouraged by Hobbs’ little wave in that direction. 

“Guy. You know that I’ve now officially parted ways with the company--” 

“I know that. So have I, the bunch of wankers. Which frees me up to haunt your bedside for a while. You didn’t think you were getting rid of me that easily, did you, James?” 

From the doorway, Horatio watches the dumpy little PA come inside, set out dinner on the rolling table by the bed, and take his seat. Hobbs puts a hand over Sawyer’s and gives him a reassuring smile. 

Sawyer stares back, bewildered and adrift. 

Horatio leaves them. 

* * *

 

They stop and get some curry takeaway on the way home. They’ve driven all the way to the next town over for the hospital-- more inland, some actual industry that isn’t warehouses and tugboats, double the population, and real shops-- so they might as well get their petrol worth out of the journey. Maria’s wrapped up whatever she was playing-- something with a first person POV that makes Horatio motion sick-- and has it turned off by the time Bill’s shuffling out the containers and handing out dishes and spoons, and they generally make a mess of things until everyone’s got a plateful of what they want. 

Horatio eats and doesn’t talk, letting Bill and Maria get into a discussion about some video game thing that’s apparently very exciting-- he doesn’t really game, himself, unless coaxed into it by his flatmates, bringing up the rear with much panicked button mashing in a game of Mario Kart or Brawl. Social games. He doesn’t mind that, because Bill always comes with him to poker night when he asks, even though Bill’s eyes tend to glaze over when the rules get complicated. 

“Some of the girls from work were going to get together a little game tonight, you don’t mind if I-?” Maria gestures at the TV. 

“Nah,” Bill says magnanimously. “All yours, I have plans.” 

Horatio looks curiously at him, because he hadn’t thought Bill would want to go out again, but then again Bill’s not a great sullen introvert. He likes being around people. 

“Splendid. I’ll keep it down, but it’s GTA. You’ll be all right, won’t you, I know the car crash noises bother you,” she says apologetically to Horatio. They do. They’re quite realistic car-crashing noises. And tires screeching. But she really is very good about keeping the volume down. “Six-man Cops and Crooks, so there won’t be any of that silly dialogue at least.” 

“I’ll be fine,” he promises manfully. It’s a good reminder that he can’t sit here all night, wedged in at his usual spot on the settee between Maria and Bill, so he pushes to his feet, gathers up the dishes. “I’ll put my headphones on, too.” They block out almost everything, anyway, and Maria will be wearing hers. And mostly the sounds of Maria on her console don’t bother him much, realistic car crash noises aside. They’re familiar, comforting.

Bill trails him into the kitchen, stepping up to be a big warm wall at his back while he puts the dishes in the sink. “Mm, I’ll help you dry those. Then my room?” 

“I thought you were going out?” 

“No?” Bill sounds puzzled, and then: “Oh. I didn’t say I was going out, I said I had plans.” 

Oh. Plans. Actually that sounds amazing, but he’s almost afraid to try it. He’s afraid that the hospital will stick with him. 

“I don’t know if I should-- it wasn’t good, Bill. I mean, it wasn’t a nice visit.” 

“Yeah, I figured.” He sounds worried. “I thought this might help get your mind off it. We can talk about it, instead, if you need? Anything you like.”

Horatio tries to figure out a way to say he doesn’t feel like he deserves the attention without using those exact words. He wouldn’t know what to say to Bill anyway, and he busies himself washing the dishes. Bill doesn’t push for an answer, because he’s perfect; he falls in to dry instead. 

They make short work of the dishes, they’re a good team, and Horatio leaves Bill with the last few dishes and the dishtowel and heads over to get the leftovers and box them up. Maria trades him the last of the pasanda for a kiss on the cheek, her game powering up on the telly. He shoves the takeaway into the fridge-- getting empty again, they should stock up. Once this project is over, he’ll drive over to the next town and the Tesco.

Once this project is over. He squares his shoulders, and tries not to sag immediately after. Another few hours tonight. Most of tomorrow-- he can probably cut Bill’s time in half at least, do testing and coding in one go, and most of the day is going to be putting all the puzzle pieces together and hoping they get a system that does even remotely anything. Then half a day Sunday to finish everything up, and it will all be over but Wolfe's sign-off.

He makes it as far as the settee, digs a hand in his pocket, pats at the thumb drive, and can’t quite bring himself to pull it out yet.

“‘Aitch?” Bill’s leaning against the settee arm, gives him a reassuring ‘still up to talk about it, still up to shag’ look. 

He doesn’t know how to articulate it to Bill, what he saw when he was leaving the hospital. How it had made him feel more sympathy than anything else had for that tyrannical asshole. That last look on Sawyer’s face, the awkward shock that someone was going to stay with him, in all his toxicity and cruelty, without being forced to do so, is something that Horatio feels on a fairly regular basis. 

_Why are you my friend. I’m fucking awful._

He tries to put on a smile and a shrug, something appropriately smug for having seen the combined personal nightmare of the entire office harmless and in a hospital gown, and not look like he wants to shake Bill by the shirt and ask him why, why do you apparently like me, why would any sane person be my friend? 

It comes out somewhere between what he means it to and what he’s actually feeling and feels tight, like rigor mortis has set in. So he gives up smiling altogether. He’s thinking of Sawyer, still, bitter old man, so paranoid and afraid. And God knows Horatio could wind up that way, too. If he doesn’t occasionally actually accept that for whatever reason, he is loved. 

Bill keeps staring at him, his eyes crinkled up in patient, gentle good humour. Horatio finally gives in and lets some of his misery out in a groan, tipping over so his forehead thunks into Bill’s shoulder, warm and solid. Bill’s hand comes up and cups the back of his head, taking his weight, fingers digging into his hair and rubbing softly, and Horatio’s groan perks up a little.

“Ah, there we are,” Bill teases, and Horatio knows this one’s a tease, the way he can feel the smile when Bill pulls him up to press a kiss to his lips.

“Mmm,” Horatio says, as all the jittery guilty stress running up and down his spine starts to warm up and mellow out, and he wriggles a little closer, wedging their lips tight together and sliding a leg over Bill’s hips, up onto the settee arm, rocking into him. Bill just does these things. These wonderful things. He doesn’t know why but it’s amazing. He deepens the kiss, can tell Bill’s still smiling and bites at his lips--

“Not in the living room, loves,” Maria says patiently. Horatio flushes up red and Bill licks his lips as if said blush is attractive instead of a mottled red blotchiness. 

“Sorry, Maria,” he says contritely, and stoops, one arm on the settee back, to get Horatio over his shoulder.

Horatio jams his teeth into his bottom lip, bites down hard not to make any embarrassing noises until they have a shut door muffling them-- Bill knows what it does for him, his massive masculine solidity. Big rugger body, classic grecian torso, strong chin. Which Horatio bites as soon as Bill lets him down onto the bed, sets his teeth in gently to feel the muscle over the bone, groaning at the feel of it and the salty taste of skin. 

“Oh, ‘Aitch,” Bill mutters, kneeling over him and turns his head so that Horatio can bite at his lips again, nibble them beestung and wet. 

Horatio’s khaki trousers pull as he tries to get his legs around Bill’s torso-- he grunts in annoyance and tries to scrabble them off, getting one shoe off, one leg out, calling it a done thing as soon as he can hook his ankle up, rub Bill’s strong arse with his heel. 

“Oh you’re so pretty,” Bill says, ludicrously, and licks down his neck. Horatio fights down a squeak as moist pressure hits that one patch of nerves right by his collarbone. “You’ve been holding up like a hero, God, that little speech yesterday, you could have told me to go to hell and I’d have booked tickets, you were so convincing.” 

At some point Bill will learn that he doesn’t need flattery to get Horatio going, that it’s the sound of his voice and not whatever affectionate nonsense he’s saying that gets to him, but as long as Bill just keeps talking he doesn’t really care what the words are.

He gets Bill’s shirt unbuttoned-- _classic_ torso, Christ, it’s fantastic-- and wiggles down until he get his teeth into Bill’s pecs, making Bill grumble in the best way. He flexes his hips helplessly at the sound, up right off the bed, and Bill slides his hands under his arse and pulls him out from underneath. Horatio tries not to whine too loudly. 

Bill flips him over and pulls his one shoe and khakis off entirely, pants following, and grinds his groin against Horatio’s ass. His jeans are rough enough to scrape, and Horatio shoves back, rubbing harder and spreading his legs until he can feel the friction against his balls and the skin there starts feeling almost raw, achingly tender.

“You’re so lovely,” Bill says, dazed, “how are you so lovely,” and pulls back enough that Horatio can twist and turn over and tug him down to kiss. 

Bill’s a good kisser, and Horatio loves kissing, even if it means he can’t hear Bill’s voice getting hotter and rougher, so he keeps Bill there, warm and heavy against him. Bill doesn’t seem to mind-- never minds-- and they get an easy rhythm going. Horatio presses up into him, wraps one leg around his back, gets the other over his hips, stroking his heel up and down the back of Bill’s amazing thighs, foot bumping over the hard ridge where Bill’s prosthetic starts and his left leg gets a little harder and smoother under his jeans. He wriggles into just the right place to tilt and rock his arse up against Bill’s dick. 

“Should I get the lube out-?” 

“Yes,” Horatio says quickly, because a good solid fucking sounds wonderful right now. “Yes please, thank you.” 

“Thank _me_ ,” Bill huffs with amusement, and rolls off the bed, holding onto the headboard to steady himself, hopping out of his jeans and shoes and digging in the nightstand for condoms and lubricant. He pulls out the box, gives Horatio a teasing, considering look and laughs, digging out one condom and tossing the box aside. “Just the one,” he says. “We have to get _some_ sleep tonight.”

It’s easy and comfortable from there; they’ve done this before, loads of times, have a rhythm and a lot of confidence in each other. 

Poor Maria had had to test the water after the first time, had to figure out if she was suddenly living with a couple, instead of a couple of blokes who worked together and mostly got along. But it’s not a relationship as such, Horatio’s never really done relationships as such-- it’s just Bill’s warm, solid friendship and generosity and satisfaction and the way Horatio loves his touch. The way that Bill accepts cheerfully that Horatio has rolled his way happily from strong arms to strong arms since he was seventeen and his hormones kicked firmly into gear, and not only doesn’t mind that but seems bizarrely gratified to be a pair of said arms from time to time. 

He’d call it ‘friends with benefits’ if benefits wasn’t such an insufficient word for how good it feels to settle his legs over Bill’s shoulders and feel Bill cupping his skinny hips in his hands. 

He makes a happy noise, Bill makes one back, and Horatio grabs the lubricant and reaches between his legs to spread it sloppily over himself, not very effective or graceful, but Bill just chuckles breathily and slides his hands a little, grabbing scant handfuls of Horatio’s nigh nonexistent ass, coaxing him open, working the lube inside. Horatio opens the condom with slippery hands while Bill is busy, handing it down to be rolled down Bill’s lovely thick cock-- he’d do it himself if he could reach, but at least he can look down between his legs and watch. 

Bill nudges in experimentally, Horatio says: “Yes, good--” 

He loves this part, the initial stretching slide, a bit of a burn but mostly that wicked little tease as muscles stretch and strain and give, and loves it like this, watching as Bill’s cock slowly disappears into him. If he’s being honest, he really loves pretty much every part of being fucked. 

Hesitant initial probing gives way to big jolting thrusts of Bill’s hips that rock the bed-- it’s just the best feeling, it really is, as if the room has come unmoored and the pounding motion that feels like it’s filling Horatio up to the ribcage is shaking the whole flat, jarring him loose from thinking too much or worrying too hard about anything that isn’t Bill’s lovely dick and his strong hands and the sloppy kisses they manage every few strokes. He wraps his arms around Bill’s neck for a bit and then just flings them up to lie against the headboard, letting them go limp and loose. 

Horatio isn’t hard, not really, massively aroused but all the blood’s rallying around to the prostate and the nerves surrounding and there isn’t much to spare to get him erect-- Bill plays with him a bit, but knows better than to work too hard on getting him off; that will come later. Horatio just wants this one thing right now, as hard as he can get it, as long as Bill can stand it. And he does it so well. Champion. Beautiful, perfect man, he keeps going and going and swearing and pleading, and when he’s started to go this astonishing red in the face Horatio takes mercy, garbles at him to come, come on, go ahead, right in him, hard as he can-- 

Bill arches back, all sweaty and muscles rippling, and does. Into the condom, of course, but Horatio likes to think (a little romantically, a little deliriously) that he can feel the force of it just the same. 

“Oh, ‘Aitch,” Bill moans, sagging a little, slowly pulling out and melting on top of him, leaving the condom to go saggy around himself. “Ooh, you perfect, perfect thing.” 

He leans in for a kiss, swallowing Horatio’s instinctive sound of protest, and reaches for his dick, working it up hard with long, firm strokes. Horatio’s so thoroughly reamed out that he can feel himself slowly closing back up, a delicious nasty feeling that makes it so easy to get hard, to come in Bill’s sweat-slick lube-slick hand between one lazy, tongue-sucking kiss and the next. 

Bill’s all flushed with exertion, glowing beautifully, and he looks as happy as Horatio feels, all flushed and less attractively splotched. Horatio is absolutely high, soaking in endorphins and happy chemicals, and exhausted. 

“Brilliant,” he murmurs to Bill, and gives his cheek a big smacking kiss. 

“Yeah,” Bill drawls, eyes lidded, a ridiculous grin on his face. “Shower?” 

“Nah.” A little stink tomorrow is entirely worth not having to move tonight. Horatio stirs himself to as much motion as is needful to get some tissues from the box on the nightstand and get Bill’s condom off and wrapped up and binned, and to give one to Bill to clean his hand with, and then his head flops back. 

Bill has to roll over, disengaging his left leg and letting it slide to the floor-- he gets sore, he says, if he tries to sleep with it-- and then he snuggles up against Horatio, warm and solid and as reliable as the goddamn sun. 

The ceiling seems to be gently spinning, but Horatio refuses to do anything about that right now. He shuts his eyes, ignoring it pointedly, and when he remembers to open them again it’s morning, light coming through the curtains and his phone buzzing its alarm from the floor. 

 

They get in a bit later than they meant to that morning, pulling into the car park in their little two car convoy-- the Vauxhall running like a slightly stodgy dream since Monday, touch wood-- but clutching his coffee cup, Horatio can’t bring himself to mind as much as he knows he should. His whole body still feels like it’s vibrating, humming down to his bones. Bill goes to put the kettle on, and they settle in. Neither of them mention last Saturday.

The work for hours. In early afternoon, Bill runs out to the chippy and gets them lunch, and grabs a some microwave meals and a box of protein bars and some juice from the corner shop for later-- and one of those communist Germany scavenged pots of Nescafe, which he tucks into one of Horatio’s desk drawers despite Horatio’s protests. Then they get back to work.

“I’m done,” Bill finally says, around seven. “I’m out of work. I know-- I didn’t think it was possible either.” Horatio tugs himself free from the treacle of Programming: Go and stares muzzly. “You want me to keep you company--”

“No, no.” Horatio pulls away from his keyboard entirely to screw the poptop off one of the juice bottles. Bless Bill. He really would be lost without him. “It’s all right. I’m just going to power through this rest, until I get tired.”

Bill’s expression is dubious at best. He knows how Horatio can get. “And you don’t need me breathing down your neck. Want I should swing by around ten? Eleven? If you’re not back yet?”

“No,” Horatio waves a hand. “No, no. Don’t worry about me. I’m almost done.”

“Aitch, I don’t want you killing yourself over this. We can come back tomorrow-- I'll come back with you, if you still come in.”

“It’s your sister’s birthday tomorrow, isn’t it?” One of Bill’s sisters. Horatio can’t keep track of them, and he only knows there’s a birthday because he and Bill gave up and synced calendars on Tuesday. 

“She’s a big girl,” Bill protests. “I don’t need to be there for the whole thing, just swing by with some wine and best wishes.”

“Yes, you do, you’re her brother,” Horatio says, like he has any idea how siblings work. But he’s certain on this point. “Bill, you’ve been a lifesaver. Really, I couldn’t have done this without you. I’ll be home late, but I’ll get it done. Don’t worry about me.”

“Of course I worry, ‘Aitch,” Bill says gently enough that it doesn’t hurt, and leans over to kiss his lips and then forehead. “Don’t be here too late.” They both know he will. “And ring me no matter what time it is, okay? I will come and get you. Do not drive.”

Horatio promises, eats one of the protein bars, and then slips back into work. He looks at the clock while the latest round compiles-- eleven thirty. Then two thirty, and he gives up and makes a cup of the instant, regrets it immediately because the entire top of the mug is an oil slick, and drowns it in sugarcubes and UHT milk from the breakroom. Almost done. Four o’clock. In the home stretch. Six o’clock. His alarm goes off, and he silences it, staring at what he’s trying to write. Hadn’t Roberts done something like this-- yes. Perfect. 

Seven forty-five. Finished. 

Actually properly finished until Monday when everything can be polished off and synced. There is nothing else he can do right now.

He goes and vomits the remains of the instant coffee and the protein bar. Gets his toothbrush from his desk drawer, splashes water on his face. He looks-- well. He looks like someone who’s been staring at a computer screen for twenty four hours. Eats another protein bar, drinks some juice. Puts his head down on his desk like it’s finals again and is instantly dreaming code, unspooling in nonsensical ribbons across the backs of his eyelids.

* * *


	3. Ed

Strictly speaking, Ed doesn’t assume command of this little outpost of ruffians, ne’er do wells and software engineers until Monday, tomorrow. 

Loosely speaking, he wants his damn things moved in today so that he can have four quiet hours together to see just how amazing Dick Clive’s records are. He stopped getting reports months back-- whether the cowardly old lush stopped keeping records at the same time, or if he kept records and hid them, and whether anything he’d written for the last few weeks is accurate anyway is anyone’s guess. 

It’s his own fault for ignoring the situation out here, hiding behind that sideways promotion to ‘finance officer’ to bury himself in cost analysis and harassing the marketing team instead of doing something about this office. It’s a damn fireship, this branch, crowded with undesirables, unfortunates, and general expendable personal. Easy to forget the place even exists in this misbegotten little coastal town, all dockyards and paved lots and a tiny residential area. The nearest cafe is almost a half hour away along none-too-decent road and in good weather, if you don’t count that a couple of local mechanics apparently have an espresso stand. He doesn’t. 

He considers that, grimly, as he hauls in the small box of non-essentials to put next to the larger box of essential equipment on what is going to be, God help him, his desk. He’s still got a box of reference books out in the car, but he’s going to need help with those; his back isn’t what it used to be. He may have to resort to sack-truck, or leave them for the movers on Monday afternoon. 

Not Monday morning. No, that would warn the employees, who know someone’s coming from the London Office, but not who. He fully intends to be mostly moved in, certificates up on his walls, laptop humming, Jim installed in the executive assistant’s desk, as if he’d always been there. 

That’s the other reason for moving in on Sunday, of course: terrified employees. He has a reputation for being frightening that he’d like to keep up. 

“This executive kitchenette hasn’t been touched in ages,” Jim says, coming in, patting dust distastefully off of his latex-gloved hands. “The mini-fridge has to go tomorrow. Cleaning wouldn’t help. It’s obviously not reliable and new life is slowly evolving inside; we’ll need a new one.” 

“All right,” Ed says placidly. He knows better than to disagree with Jim Doughty on the matter of organization or comestibles. “That will probably take a few days. How are we until then?” 

“I’ll make do with a cooler.” His assistant looks around unhappily. “I’ll get the computer set up this afternoon. God, what a hole.” 

Ed would disagree, if it wasn’t such a hole. It must have been a beautiful building, back when the company bought the property, but a skeleton programming crew and a smaller janitorial staff have just given it over to dust and bare corners, worn carpet, dirty walls.

There’s an oasis of life and maintenance by the nearby cubicles, which he fully intends to poke around later so that he can memorize names and desks-- yes, he does like to appear to be psychic, thank you for asking. Sawyer’s office is bare but for trash and miscellaneous office supplies: his computer’s been seized by corporate, and when his assistant quit, he obviously took what was left of value, and left the rest with a resounding sod off to Sawyer’s successor. There’s likely a weekend maintenance crew, but if he can find a hoover he and Jim can at least get their new outposts in order with no outside help. 

As if wishing summoned him, here’s Jim with a hoover. “What’s our priority? Hoovering or civilization?” 

“I’ll hoover, you bring civilization to this unwashed land,” Ed says cheerfully. He can work a hoover handily, and Jim has certain arcane skills that he should be left free to employ. 

“Right. I’ll go to the corner shop for ice, and see what I can do.” 

“God bless you, my son. As the bishop said to the prostitute.” 

Jim, who takes being an executive assistant seriously in some strange old middle of the century way, doesn’t crack a smile, but gives that little lift of blond eyebrows that indicates mild amusement and tolerance for Ed’s crudeness. 

Ed rummages through the various closets until he finds the maintenance one, presses a bucket and a few rags into his own service, and gets to work. He dusts crud off of all the flat surfaces and onto the floor, empties out the drawers of the main office and the assistant’s desk, and then scrubs everything down. It’s a soothing monotony, irritating only in the knowledge that he can’t do it forever and he’ll have to actually sit down to bad bookkeeping soon. 

Once the flat surfaces are done, he hoovers. The sound of the machine raises echos in the halls, stirs up that faint unnerving feeling of being not quite alone that you got in big old buildings, and Ed pushes through it because by God at his age he’s not going to jump at shadows. He does get a good startle when Jim gets back, carrying a small cooler, but hides it well enough and gives the man a nod and a smile. 

He cleans, he hears Jim setting up in the kitchenette with things that clank and need to be screwed onto other things, he knows the world is at peace. 

He’s moved onto sitting down reluctantly with Clive’s records when he hears the familiar soft rattle of cutting blades and shriek of steam, and smells roasted coffee and hot milk. Perfect. He puts his head back down, buoyed by the knowledge that soon, there will be a latte. 

Jim has been his assistant for many years now; Ed is attuned to the length of time it takes the man to make a perfect cup. After six minutes, he feels a strange sense of disquiet-- he realizes it’s because there’s not a cup of coffee next to him. 

When he comes out of the office to find out why, he sees Jim in the kitchenette talking to someone-- a tall lanky figure, curly haired, male. 

“--just worked twenty-two hours at a shot. Please. I’ll pay you. It’s been _years_. Year, singular, anyway, months, please--” 

“I’m not in the habit of playing barista,” Jim says lifting his chin haughtily. “This is for my manager. Are you my manager? You aren’t? Then you can’t have any.” 

“This is cruel. You’re cruel. It’s something the London office cooked up, psychological warfare. They’re all crazy, you know. Manipulative and crazy. Please, I really need some coffee,” the stranger begs. 

Fascinating. Ed takes off his reading glasses and tucks them in a pocket, then clears his throat sharply. 

“Manipulative and crazy, are we, Mister--” he starts with his best roar, but as the tall man turns, alarmed, Ed recognizes him instantly. “--Mister Hornblower?” he finishes, a little taken aback. 

The young man’s dark eyes are ringed with bruised looking skin; they go wide, revealing more bloodshot white than is comfortable, and perhaps that twenty-two hours thing wasn’t an exaggeration. Programmers, they do this sort of thing. For a moment, those dark eyes and the angular body poised for flight remind him of a fawn, startled and about to bolt. Then Hornblower collects himself visibly.

“Sorry, Mister Pellew.” So he remembers Ed. “Don’t know what I was thinking. Pardon me,” he says calmly, and strides away, vanishing down an unknown hall. 

“I think you scared him.” Jim sounds faintly accusatory. 

“Yes, well.” Perhaps he should have saved the intimidation tactics for someone not already on the verge of mental collapse. He’ll get as bad as Hammond in his old age. 

“I’m going to take him something to drink, the poor little lamb,” Jim says decisively, as if he hadn’t been holding out against a siege a minute ago. “He’s been here all weekend, you know.” 

“Yes. But-- yes. All right. He’s fond of coffee.” Always had a paper cup, back in London, working his way through every halfway convenient espresso counter around, hadn’t he been.... 

“And he’s been out here for how long? Over a year? How awful,” Jim tuts, and puts the cup he’s holding into Ed’s hands absentmindedly. “Drink that, do you know how he takes his?” He’s already back to the little portable machine, smacking out the old grounds into the trash, grinding another scoop of beans. 

Ed squints into the past and remembers takeaway cups marked ‘MO DBL’ or things to that effect. “...I think he likes a mocha.” 

“Hmm, I’m not sure about this syrup-- I’m not sure about that shop-- but it won’t kill him.” Jim works intently, pulling two more shots, glaring at what remains of the steamed milk before deeming it still of quality, taking another cup out of his moving box and giving it a quick rinseout before pouring things together, mixing syrup and thick dark espresso, making a perfect little leaf out of the steamed milk without seeming to think about it. “I’ll just go find him, shall I?” 

“I could--” 

“You’d better not. Let me make sure he’s caffeinated before you start barking at him again.” 

Jim bustles off with the cup. Ed sips at his. God, the man makes a good latte. Organizes an office like a machine, too, but the coffee is, secretly, why Ed hired him in the first place. He eyes the doorway to the executive office, the abandoned financial reports on the desk. He glances over at the espresso machine. But no, he knows better than to try to help Jim by cleaning that. Coffee is strictly Jim’s domain, and well it should be, because this latte is delicious, and disappearing much too quickly. It’s the hint of cinnamon, Ed reasons. It adds a certain magic. And it’s far, far better than whatever those mechanics are forcing on the poor work crew around here.

Both his conscience and his workload prickle at him. He would go join Jim-- how long does it take to deliver coffee? Where had Hornblower escaped to?-- but he doesn’t need both of them wandering around the strange old building, and besides, the poor fawn might bolt if too many hounds descend on him. He had started off in fine roaring form, and if the poor boy hadn’t been apparently twenty-and-some sleepless hours into a breakdown, it would have been splendid. 

He should keep plowing through Clive’s mess. Before he can force himself to get to it, Jim’s back, lips pursed disapprovingly. “He’s in the toilet. He’s crying,” he informs Ed regally, scooping up the steamed milk container. “And I think he’d been knocking his head on the wall. I hope you’re pleased.”

Oh hell. 

“I’ll go make sure he knows he’s not in trouble.” 

“Give him a minute to clean his face off.” 

Ed winces. He hadn’t been that hard on the lad, had he? He knows he’s a bit of a tyrant, always has been. He’s never been afraid of the power of a good verbal dressing down, or the inspiration of a bit of cold fear of Pellew. He hadn’t even worked up to a full bellow, but going by the reports and signatures London had been receiving, Hornblower had been holding this office together this past week-- at the cost of his own sleep and well-being, it seemed-- and he wasn’t up for it. Those marathon working days popped up from time to time in the main office too, involving late nights and strange energy drinks and joking (one hopes) about the Ballmer peak-- it’s not usually due to an emergency on this level, though. The stakes are rather higher here. 

And there’s his problem: he’s thinking of the programmers at home office instead of a smaller, unfamiliar group of men, one of whom recently witnessed a brutal assault on one coworker by another, and he really should make sure things are a bit more stable around here first. 

He wants this place to work, despite Hammond’s insistence that the office isn’t worth keeping. There’s a chance to make this office more than just a satellite-- if it can be saved. 

“Right,” he says, half to himself. “Which toilet?” 

Jim gestures down the hall. “Right at the end of the corridor, on the left.” 

It’s easy to find, and once he’s inside, so is Hornblower, seated against the wall by the far stall, impossibly long legs curled up to his chin, mocha held reverently to his mouth. His face is still a bit wet, a touch dirty with tears and exhaustion, and there’s a red patch on his forehead. Caffination had apparently been higher on his list than face cleaning. Well, Ed’s had Jim’s coffee. He understands. 

He clears his throat, and Hornblower near levitates to his feet. 

“No, no,” Ed waves a hand. “As you were. Sit, Mister Hornblower.”

Hornblower stares at him for a moment, confusion writ large under slightly too-wide eyes, and then folds back down to the ground, those long legs bending nearly in half, and it’s incredibly awkward and bizarrely graceful. Again, all Ed can think of is a fawn, big sad brown eyes, long knobby legs, and he’s really going to need to stop that. 

Ed hesitates only long enough to decide it’s Sunday, no one is going to come in, and besides, he owes the man, and sprawls down against the wall under the hand dryer, cater-corner to Hornblower. He just hopes his back doesn’t decide to firmly declare its age when he tries to get up. 

Hornblower’s cheeks flush, his jaw rough with stubble, and he jerks a hand toward his face-- stops it and hovers it there, and Ed makes a show of looking around to give him time to at least wipe some of the tear tracks away. “Can’t say I’ve ever seen a toilet from this position before,” he says, bringing in a little bit of levity. He’s seen them from quite a few positions, it’s true, but never from exactly this one, and it’s been oh, at least a decade since he got overly creative in public toilet.

It was the wrong thing to say. Hornblower tries to get up again, obviously thinks better of looming over his boss, sinks back down, and stumbles through an apology. 

“None of that,” Ed finally says, cutting him off. “If anyone here owes an apology, I’m afraid it’s me, Mister Hornblower. I should have paid greater care to the situation. I understand you’ve had a very long week, and I’m sure you were quite as surprised to stumble upon us as we were to see you.”

“Mister Doughty explained why you’re here,” Hornblower offers.

“Did he now?” ‘Mister Doughty’, was it? Well, Jim would like that. Nothing like instilling the proper sense of respect the moment you arrived. Not that Ed was fooled; Jim wouldn’t give coffee to just anyone, mental collapse or not. Jim hadn’t known Hornblower in the London office, so Ed can’t help but be impressed with how quickly Hornblower seems to have melted his otherwise icy heart. No mean feat, when the man had been known to reduce some junior finance officers to tears himself, if they were a little too pushy about getting a slice of Ed’s highly scheduled time.

“We knew there was going to be new management. Nobody knew it was going to be you,” Hornblower says thoughtfully. 

“Well, it is. Here to see if I can whip some shape into you. I’ve been cleaning up Sawyer’s office, today, so I’m well stocked up on torture devices.” This time he tries to make it a bit more obvious that he’s joking, but the smile he gets in response is wan. “Oh, look here, it won’t be so bad. We’ll have a status meeting on Monday and see how much more time’s needed on the Sutherland Shipping project, and then I’ll see how much new manpower we need--” 

“Sutherland Shipping’s done, sir,” Hornblower breaks in. “Beta status, at least, there’ll be the usual bug fixes and patches to roll out, but we’ve made it in time to get it onto their test vehicles.” 

“Have you?” Ed can’t keep the surprise out of his voice. He’s seen Sawyer’s creative and inconsistent status updates. He’d have put good money on needing at least another three weeks, even going full steam ahead. 

“Put the last bit in a few hours ago. Wolfe has to sign off tomorrow but his team’s ready.” 

“Well done, then.” 

“The team did an amazing job, sir.” 

The team, Ed notes, is not here on Sunday morning. “And when did you last sleep, Mister Hornblower?” 

“About a half hour ago, actually,” the young man says, gives him a nervous smile. “I’d just put my head down for an hour. I, ah, I smelled coffee.” 

Jim’s coffee. Oh yes, that would tempt anyone awake, even if the sound of him hoovering hadn't.

“Mister Doughty wouldn’t let me apologize, sir, but if you’d tell him I’m sorry. I was a little dazed, I’m sure I wasn’t making any sense. And I was a bit inappropriate.” 

“I’ll mention it to him,” Ed says, making a mental note to ask about ‘inappropriate’. If all the young man means is that he slagged off the management that had been driving him to exhaustion, he has an admirably conservative definition of the word. Shy little thing, he catches himself thinking fondly, and then thinks: whoops. “But I’m sure it can all be forgotten.” 

“Thank you, sir.” Hornblower smiles with genuine relief. Worryingly, he looks as if he thinks Ed is doing him some kind of favor instead of displaying a minimum standard of reasonableness. Worrying because what have these people got acclimated to? And more worrying still, because Ed really, really likes the look of that shy little smile. He’s going to need to work on that. Definitely going to need to stop making plans to see more of it. 

“I disagreed with the decision to move you to this satellite office,” he says, suddenly, trying to move back to business matters. “You did good work, and we lost more than we gained by trying to settle those personal differences so cavalierly.” It had seemed unfortunate and necessary at the time-- whatever spin you put on the fight between Hornblower and Simpson, they’d needed to be separated, and Simpson had had months of seniority, so got to stay. 

And then they’d had to fire the man two months later for keeping pornography on his work computer, and what had been the point of uprooting Hornblower’s life and shipping him off to no-where? 

“Thank you, sir,” Hornblower says, as if he’s not sure he’s supposed to say anything at all. 

“No, young man, don’t thank me.” He certainly hadn’t disagreed loudly enough to stop it from happening, and he knows that he could have. “And as bad as the business is, it’s a stroke of luck we have you here. Without your efforts I think work would have stopped completely after the business with Sawyer.” 

“No-!” the young man shakes his head fervently. “No, sir, if you have that impression, it’s wrong. Everyone pulled together afterwards, everyone’s been working tens and more-- all I’ve done is sign some reports.” 

He’s so earnest, and while Ed’s sure he believes it, Ed himself knows better-- everything came to a crashing halt, the police were ringing everyone, Buckland’s leave request was a thinly veiled letter of resignation, Clive’s wasn’t veiled at all, Wellard’s family was only barely talked around from suing the whole corporation, and somehow in the midst of all this the project ground forward and things that had been coming in signed N. Buckland before started coming in signed H. Hornblower instead. That had been on top of the young man’s other workload, and what they must have had in addition to make up for young Wellard. 

“Nevertheless,” he says sternly, and Hornblower’s mouth shuts. “You’ve been invaluable in the crisis. It’s why I had hoped you’d consider putting yourself in consideration for Buckland’s position.” 

“The email-- Sir, I--” 

“You put in a resume?” 

“Yes.” 

“Good.” He nods decisively, allowing no disagreement. “I’m glad to be working with you again, Mister Hornblower,” he adds, gentling his voice and allowing the genuine sentiment to creep in. 

The programmer smiles, hesitantly-- it creeps into the corners of his lips and the crinkle of his tired eyes. “You too, Mister Pellew.” It’s equally genuine, so full of respect and pleasure that Ed’s a little taken aback. No, that’s not true. What he is is overwhelmed with the impulse to pull Hornblower onto his lap. He doesn’t, of course. But he certainly recognizes that the desire is there. Absolutely must work on this or it’s going to be a problem. 

“You aren’t driving home, I hope, in this state?” If Hornblower does need a ride, he’s going to make Jim take him, because he completely mistrusts his own motives right now. 

“No, sir. Oh, shi-- uh, Bill, my flatmate, I’ve got to ring him. He’ll be worried.” Hornblower lurches into action, sitting a little straighter against the wall, patting for a cell phone. “Crap, it’s plugged in at my desk.” 

He had wanted to get a look at the cubicles. “Well then,” Ed says, pulling himself to his feet by way of the wall. Ooh, his back seems to come through without fanfare, but one of his knees is sending a reedy protest twinging up through his leg. He needs to start spending less time behind a desk, more time out doing. Then again, that’s why he’s here, isn’t it? “You can give me the tour on the way.” 

There isn’t much to the office to tour, at least not that had been maintained. There are the basics, no more than what he’d been expecting: a small break room, a dingy, dusty little supply room with what looks to be a shelf full of floppy discs, a records room, a boardroom, and a few smaller meeting rooms. Of the meeting rooms, the boardroom has video conferencing capabilities-- and was where Sawyer had done his best to murder young Mister Wellard, but Hornblower leads them past without comment. 

He goes right for his phone when they reach the part of the floor that’s been given over to open plan cubicles, sliding open the screen and tapping in a passcode with fast, confident fingers. Ed turns away, looking out at the view of the car park from the wall of windows. He can’t help but overhear, but if Hornblower had wanted privacy, he could have stepped out. Ed has long made it a habit to consider carefully every action he observes someone taking; it’s only reasonable, then, to presume that every action is taken with as much care.

He likes to judge a man based on what he sees them do. Gossip is nothing but hearsay, after all, and five retellings of the same story will just get you five stories. Your own eyes-- well, he won’t say they won’t deceive you. He’s got the reading glasses tucked into his pocket after all, damn the things. But when you see someone’s actions, you’ve a much better chance of telling their worth.

He’s heard things about young Mister Hornblower. The impressions of his supervisor who recommended him for Ed’s team, before Ed had been promoted out of individual project work. And of course, he’d heard about the incident with Simpson. He’d been inclined to believe Hornblower’s version of events from the beginning; his own experiences with Hornblower had been nothing but promising, and Simpson had a nasty reputation brewing with HR. But Simpson had been the more vocal of the two, Hornblower tight lipped and brusquely uncommunicative to the office gossip pool, which hadn’t curried him any favour with the general tide of good or ill will. There’d been rumours-- vicious, especially after Hornblower had been shipped off. It had been hard to even recognise the young man in some of the versions of events that he’d heard after a few hand-offs between floors.

He’d done good work here, though. Especially this past week. Ed reminds himself to take a closer look at the Sutherland Shipping reports, not just Clive’s financials or Sawyer’s updates. He’s beginning to suspect if he compares them with this last week’s, he’ll notice a few trends. 

Hornblower’s friend must have been waiting for the phone call-- Hornblower’s only just brought it up to his ear when he says: “Bill-- yeah, it’s me. No, no, everything’s fine. Completely fine. No, really-- I just fell asleep.”

The bashfulness in his tone is enough to make Ed bite down on his lip, and he’s very glad he’s facing away. He is too bloody old for this, he really needs to sit himself down and get ahold of himself. Pulling anyone into one’s arms without communication is hardly appropriate, never mind a younger subordinate who’s had, Ed suspects, a least a very bad week if not a very bad year. He is not bartering a cafe mocha for a ravishing, no matter how tempting the prospect.

“Are you sure? Now? Are you at your sister’s yet? I don’t want to-- okay. Okay. Please. At the front door? Yes, thank you.”

Ed arches his brow when Hornblower hangs up, questioning, and Hornblower’s obviously embarrassed and doing his best to pretend he isn’t, so Ed tries to take pity on him, keeping his tone casual, his question simple. “Everything all right?”

“Yeah,” Hornblower shoves his phone in his pocket, bends to sweep a cereal bar wrapper from his desk to his bin. “He’s coming to get me. Be here in twenty. He’d been waiting to hear from me-- made me promise I’d ring for a lift when he left last night.”

“He knows the way then?” It’s the politest way he can think of asking just why Hornblower’s flatmate had been at the office last night.

“Oh! Yes--” Hornblower points at a cubicle a few spots away from his own. “Bill. Bill Bush, he’s our business analyst. He was helping me with the project last night.” 

That makes two in the office who will be forewarned of his invasion. Damn. He really had been hoping to make an entrance. 

“Then I expect he’ll be along quickly,” he says, and drains the last of his latte. Cold, now, but still delicious, and if that doesn’t say everything about Doughty’s coffee, he doesn’t know what does. “I don’t know about you, Mister Hornblower, but I would like some more coffee.” 

He gestures down the hall, and Hornblower fidgets for two seconds of awkward hesitancy, then smiles that sweet, shy smile (damn, now he knows coffee’s all he needs to bring it out, the mocha-for-ravishing trade is sounding more and more tempting) and grabs a rucksack and jacket from beside his chair.

“Yes _please_ ,” he says, and Ed tries not to commit the sound of it to memory. 

 

Jim arches an eyebrow in a far too knowing way when Ed makes his request, but he delivers like he always does. It’s a lovely October morning, late enough that the sun’s made it pleasantly warm, but too early for rain clouds to have moved in. That’s a lie: it’s never too early, but Ed isn’t going to waste the weather, so when Horatio, reverently sipping at his fresh mocha, decides to wait outside the entrance, Ed joins him. He knows he’s going to need to take a hard look at some of his choices today, but Hornblower does look like he could do with a week of sleep, even with the fresh espresso he’s savouring, and Ed doesn’t feel entirely comfortable leaving him on his own.

A car pulls up and admits another young man-- maybe a few years older than Hornblower and a few inches shorter, a rugger type with wide shoulders,and trim hips, and a charmingly lopsided smile. He looks at Hornblower with exasperated fondness-- Ed tries not to play ‘flatmate or boyfriend’ but winds up doing so anyway-- and starts to say something before he sees Ed. 

“Good morning,” he greets, no sign of recognition on his face; his expression changes into a broader, more even smile, polite but still friendly.

“Ah, I should have said.” Hornblower flushes a little. “This is Mister Pellew, he’s part of the new management team, he’s come from London. Mister Pellew, this is Bill Bush.” 

Bush obviously recognizes the name, and only fractionally adjusts the quality of his smile to make it into something properly deferential. Ed remembers where he heard the name: the young man who talked the client into a week’s delay. This one is interesting, too-- he seems to have all the skill with people that Hornblower didn’t get. “Pleasure to meet you,” he says, extending a hand. 

Ed takes it. As long he’s wallowing in his status as dirty old man, he has to note that Bush is quite the looker-- twinkling blue eyes, classic features brightened with easy, natural warmth-- but not quite as much of a hazard to his good sense as he’s afraid Hornblower is going to be. 

“Likewise, Mister Bush.” There’s a good deal of curiosity emanating from Bush, and much as Ed would like to keep him in suspense, he decides to be reasonable and explains: “I’m making a lateral move from finance to project management; I’ve missed development, been wanting to get back to it. I wish it were under better circumstances.” 

“I think we all do, sir,” Bush says seriously. He turns his head to Hornblower, after a pause so that it’s not so blatant that he’s checking his reaction, and his eyes crinkle a bit. “What’s that, ‘Aitch?” 

Hornblower looks down at his cup. “Mocha?” he says a little guiltily. 

Bush’s brows wrinkle up and he looks from Ed to Horatio-- but he smooths out his face almost instantly. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to have to take this one home,” he says politely, with a gesture towards Horatio. He’s still smiling, but something in his tone implies that he doesn’t actually care if Ed minds. Protective, this one. Ed’s internal game of ‘flatmate or boyfriend’ is tilting distinctly boyfriendward, or at least towards 'very good friends'. 

“Take the cup along home; get some rest, Mister Hornblower,” Ed advises, keeping an air of reserve-- no need to smile at him like he wants to chuck him under the chin and tuck him in himself. Especially in front of the justfriend-or-boyfriend.

“Yes, sir,” Hornblower says and damn him, can he stop looking so grateful about everything? “See you on Monday.” 

“Not too early, I hope. I want my team rested,” Ed says, and can at least tell himself that it’s because if they come in late he’ll still have a chance to ambush everyone else. 

“Not too early,” Bush agrees, lightly enough that he could be joking, taking Hornblower’s arm gently and giving him a concerned look like he probably isn’t joking at all. 

Ed gives them a wave, sees them packed into the car and watches them pull away. 

Well. 

This will be an adventure. 

 

He finishes his latte out on the steps, savouring the warm sun and the good espresso, then heads back into the office with his spirits renewed. Jim takes the dirty mug and doesn’t ask about the second one, and Ed goes down the hall to the cubicles again to get a better idea of the staff. 

There are little nameplates pegged up to tell him who sits where, and he starts putting the names to memory-- Roberts, Silk, Wolfe, Smith, Bush, Hornblower.... There’s still a nameplate for “Nick Buckland” that he pulls off, and another for “Henry Wellard” that he considers for a moment. Wellard has officially left his capacity as a junior programmer, and removed his possessions from company property. He won’t be getting back in without an explanation to security-- which is another thing Ed needs to follow up on, “security” apparently being a single guard who works 7-3 weekdays, and after hours and on weekends, nothing but the relatively ancient electrical door locks with their not-often-changed six digit code. 

Leaving Wellard’s nameplate up will serve more ill than taking it down, if anyone notices, he decides, and pops it off too.

There aren’t that many occupied desks, all in all. Maybe two dozen, maybe twenty, after the past week’s ravages, and about a third of them small-spec contractors. He’d known the office numbers, of course, but seeing how many of the cubicles have been given over to housing file boxes, compared to how many have actual residents, it’s a surprise. And a waste-- the floor alone could house three times the staff if it were all opened up, never mind the building. Truly, the wasted potential is staggering: he could do great things with this office, with the right team under him. All he needs is long enough to prove it. 

He takes the nameplates back to Jim to get sent to surplus, and takes a moment to find a legal pad and start writing down everything he needs to follow up on. He should see about getting some administrative support for the office, come to think of it. He can’t have Jim doing everything, and if the records they’ve found are any indication, Bill Bush has been filling the role when needed. Filling it admirably for a Business Analyst with no training, but certainly not something for the long haul, or short haul if he has his way-- another thing for the list.

The paper fills up fast. He starts an action plan, now that he’s seen the actual state of things, shows it to Jim and they start splitting tasks. Jim goes off to fetch them lunch-- “Don’t expect me for an hour, at least. There’s nothing in this town but that chippy and I’m sparing your arteries that for today at least”-- and Ed turns back to Clive’s files. As much as he’d like to go digging for everything on Sutherland Shipping, he needs to get the finances mapped out and sent off to Lambert, who is no doubt having a considerably easier time stepping into the still-temporary vacancy Ed’s left than Ed is having with the mess Sawyer’s left behind. 

With any luck-- all right, with all the luck and a prayer-- he’ll get this office off the ground, and it won’t be a temporary vacancy he’s left Lambert after all. There’s good people here, plenty of good work that needs doing: the senior management has been tossing around the idea of a military contract office for years. If he can prove it to them that this is the office... well, he’s sure he can. Hotspur is just what they need. And if it isn’t, he’ll look like an old fool, and the little crew here will lose their office and no doubt most of them will lose their positions with the company, and Integrated Systems will be losing a hell of a chance, he tells himself, and sets down to work. He has a lot to do before tomorrow morning.

It’s gone eight before he packs it in for the day, arching his back and grimacing at the pops and snaps. Jim tuts at him, but he’s still there in the executive assistant’s desk, working through his own files.

“Bright and early, Mister Doughty,” he says, with his nose well in the air. “Do take a rest this evening.” 

“Oh, yes, Mister Pellew, of course, sir,” Jim says, bobbing his head obediently, and then gives him a rare, wicked smirk. Jim has a terribly filthy sense of humour, frankly, and is a complete gossip, but it’s his diamond core of professional pride that’s usually aired in the office. Ed grins back and slips out. He’ll have to figure out something for dinner, and then he’s going to have to ring Tony back in London, because he’s afraid Hornblower is going to be a problem. 

 

Dinner is sauce from a jar over frozen tortellini and he counts it good; he’ll manage a real grocery list sometime tomorrow when he needs to clear his head for five minutes. He cleans everything away, and rings Tony. 

“Edward. How lovely to hear from you at this time of night when I was supposed to be in bed,” Tony says when he picks up, not even trying to sound sincere. 

Ed plunges ahead. “Tony. On a scale of one to ten. If I snapped at one of the programmers this weekend because he asked for some coffee, and he wound up in the toilet having a breakdown, how bad an HR fiasco is it?” 

There’s a long pause instead of an invitation to go fuck himself, so Ed knows Tony’s going to help him out after all. “...Three. That’s the kind of thing we encourage the two parties involved to sort out among themselves. We don’t get involved unless it escalates or there’s a direct complaint.” 

“Mmm.” Good old Tony, honest and without sugar-coating. He sounds vastly unimpressed-- likely because it’s ten PM on a Sunday night and he’s fielding questions from work.

Ed is, he knows, playing with fire. Anthony Bracegirdle is a quiet, serene force of Human Resources, a hirer and firer and a damn good man to be friends with if you like gossip and/or need advice. Ed loves gossip and often needs advice and is, happily, friends with him-- they had both spent some time in the trenches together when the company was thrashing its way through the late nineties and the shocking realization that the Dot Com Boom was ridiculous and unsustainable. It gives Ed certain latitude when it comes to ringing at odd hours asking worrying questions. 

“What if, hypothetically, I then asked him out to drinks.” 

“SHIT!” The bellow makes the tiny speakers of his phone crackle. “Pellew!” 

“Hypothetically, Tony! I haven’t!”

“Christ in heaven. Don’t. Don’t, don’t. Go. Take a cold shower. Leave him alone, and leave me alone, my God.”

“Look, I wasn’t going to ply him with my authority. He doesn’t report to me directly.” 

“You cornered him in the loo, Ed,” Tony says warningly. 

“It was a misunderstanding. Jim gave him some coffee and I explained I wasn’t angry. It’s that young man who was in the London office a few years back-- Hornblower, you remember? Always had a takeaway cup, fond of coffee.” 

“Oh God, leave Horatio alone. He’s a sweet boy, he doesn’t need this kind of thing.” 

So he’s ‘Horatio’ to Tony? And a sweet boy, too? The man must put out some sort of radioactivity, some waves that bring out the mothering streak. Not that Ed is projecting. At all. “‘Thing’, Tony? There’s no sort of thing. He’s a lovely young man, and I’d like to get to know him better. That’s all.” 

“How much better, Ed.” 

Ed ponders this, the haunting dark eyes, the sharp-cheeked face dusted with stubble and fatigue. The graceful way he carried exhaustion, the way Ed wanted to gather him into his arms and soothe all the misery away. 

“Better,” he temporizes. 

Tony groans. “Is it time for your midlife crisis already? I thought you’d gotten that out of the way when you divorced Sue. It was such a nice divorce, you shouldn’t even get a midlife crisis.” 

“It’s not like that. He’s just a... lovely young man.” 

“No. I’m not on the clock, I don’t have to listen to this.” 

“Really lovely.” 

“Ed.” Tony’s voice loses some of its tolerance. “I was at the office till late on Friday looking over the insurance claim for that poor boy Sawyer mangled. If legal hadn't asked for the weekend to go over it, I’d probably still be there. For God’s sake. Just. Leave them all alone. For six months. Can they have six months without an upper level anyone causing an affray in that office?” 

The wind is taken neatly from his sails. Ed leans heavily on the kitchen table, rubbing his face. Tony’s right, of course. They need to see if the situation out here can be salvaged, and that doesn’t involve flirtation with overworked programmers. ”All right. I’ve been doing more than sight-seeing, at any rate. I’ve been into the financial databases. Either Clive’s records are inconsistent, which I suspect, or our budget office was playing some astonishing games.” 

“At little of both. You know Hammond wants to scuttle the place. That whole office is a human resources meltdown and the fact that nobody’s suing is a miracle.” Tony sighs, tired and more tired, really. “Keep things together over there, Ed. I’ll be down with the new employees before the end of the week. There’s not too many, and half of them are interns, but they’re all the manpower I’ve been able to scrape together. I think Blue’s starting to listen to Hammond and his supporters.”

Ed grimaces, although whether it was because he was getting interns or because if the seniormost partner decided his new office wasn’t worth the upkeep, there wasn’t a chance in hell of salvaging it, he wasn’t sure. “Interns, Tony? I’m down a finance officer, a programmer, and a development lead, not to mention the staffing’s threadbare as it is. Whose side are you on?”

“Be grateful I’ve found you who I have,” Tony says. “The interviews for your development lead are next week-- speaking of Horatio, he’s made the shortlist. The hiring team should be ringing him soon.”

“Good. I’d rather have him than anyone external-- even our best and brightest from London. He knows the situation out _here_. He’s been holding things together.” 

“He’s a driven young man,” Tony agrees. “Good at management in his way. Awful at office politics, though, and that’s going to hurt in the interview.”

“He did just give his last director a concussion,” Ed agrees dryly, “although I think, under the circumstances, he should be given considerable leeway.”

“There are always circumstances,” Tony says shortly. “Your recommendation letter helped, but leave it at that. Playing favourites won’t help him. Now for God’s sake, Ed, go to bed, and let me. And leave Horatio alone. I’ll see you in a few days.”

Ed hangs up after Tony does, and stares dejectedly at his mobile. Plays a game of Solitaire, loses, and closes the app in disgust. Tony’s right; he should go to bed. Early morning tomorrow, office to meet. 

So he sits at his kitchen table for a while longer, thumbing idly through his contact list. What time is it in Sydney? The time difference is nine hours, isn’t it? Ten? At any rate it’s at least seven in the morning-- Sue’s up, if she hasn’t started sleeping in since they separated. He doubts it; twenty years of marriage couldn’t change her routine, he can’t see a few years single doing the job either. The woman hadn’t even slept in on holiday. 

He stabs the send button and it’s barely started to ring before she picks up, her voice concerned. "Ed?"

"Sue? Good, you're awake."

"Of course I'm awake. What's happened?"

He's worried her. He hadn't considered that. He glances at the clock on the wall and grimaces. Damned inconsiderate of him. He’s getting too self-involved; a bad sign. "No, no. No one's hurt, nothing’s wrong. I just. Oh damn. Tony thinks I'm having a midlife crisis."

She breathes out, a relieved sigh. He can almost see her rubbing at the bridge of her nose where her glasses sit. "Well, darling,” she says dryly, “you probably are."

"What? Why would you say that?"

"Ed. This is the first time you've rung me in a year."

"Ah. A year? Really?" She’s right, of course, saving-- 

“Yes. Christmas doesn't count.”

“We’ve emailed!” 

“That’s not the same thing.”

“Hmph. Well then.”

“Come on, Ed,” she says, amused and fond, and his whole back relaxes like he just sank down into a spa. Good old Sue. “What does Tony say?”

...He hadn’t thought this through. Oh hell. “Certain events transpired at one of the regional offices that necessitated quick action,” he begins. 

“Ed.”

“It’s a long story.” He takes off his glasses and rubs at his nose. “Last week, the managing director for one of the regional offices had a psychotic episode and injured an employee. The lad will recover-- he’s settled with the company. Home from hospital, too, from what I understand. The director’s gone, obviously. They needed someone to fill the spot, or Hammond was pushing to have the whole office shut down.”

“And since it was guaranteed to ruin Charlie Hammond’s day, you charged in, all hands on deck.”

“Not _entirely_ because of Hammond,” he protests. “Although God knows the man’s as good as a waving flag for pointing out what decision not to make. This office is severely underestimated-- and understaffed and under-budgeted and under-utilised, for that matter. The backend of nearly every one IS’s military contracts are funneled through here in one capacity or another, did you know that? No, sorry, of course you didn’t. I barely did. If the programmers had some real administrative support and operations management it would make the entire company more efficient. We could make the military contract office we’ve been saying we would for years now-- but not if we keep running it like an afterthought. They’ve only got one BA out here, can you believe it, one finance officer except he’s in rehab now, no programmers above a level 2 because the only one they had quit last week--”

Sue’s a saint. She listens to him tear a strip down one side of the whole sorry mess and back up the other, bears with the pauses as he gets out of his office clothes and into sleepwear.

“Sounds like your kind of crisis, dear,” she says eventually, once he’s lost the plot and started telling her about all his plans to turn the office around. She was always good at keeping him on track. “You didn’t ring me because you were worried about the office. What’s wrong?” 

That was Sue, bore his ramblings with more patience than he deserved, then when his defenses were down, cut right to the heart of the matter. Or slightly lower down. “There’s a young man.” 

She makes a small stifled sound that he can still identify as a laugh. 

“Oh, what-?” he asks, exasperated. 

“Tony’s right. You’re having a midlife crisis. Go to bed.” 

“No, Sue, please, this is trouble. I don’t want to be the second nightmare manager here.” 

She sighs, fondly. “You’re a grown man, Ed. A good man. You’ll be a gentleman, and if it’s not in the regs or he’s not having it, you’ll live. You’ll get yourself a car or something, and not be awful.” 

He scrubs his hand over his face. “Oh, Sue. He’s so pretty, though.” 

This time she laughs outright. “Tell me everything, then, my dirty-minded darling.”

“Oh, he’s-- he was a very pretty young thing in the home office, but he’s grown up into a less young thing. Still very pretty. He’s-- he makes me feel filthy, Sue.” It’s hard to put it into words, but he tries to impart the gist of it. The long legs. The huge dark eyes, the slender-fingered hands. The intense expression in his long, mobile face, the sweet little smile. All in all, the general impression of a downy nose and flicking ears. 

“Mm,” Sue says, when he’s trailed to a stop. “Yes, sounds serious. You realize it’s nearly eleven, your time.” 

“Yes, I know, don’t fuss me.” 

“Mmm-hmm.” She’s still laughing at him. “This will all seem less dramatic in the morning. Go to bed. Remember what I said about the car.” 

“You know best.” He smiles at the empty bedroom, fond; she’s always known best. They’d be very happily married still if either one of them was a little less ambitious, but at least he didn’t lose her like he’d been afraid of-- her company, her advice, however long the distance. “Thanks, Sue. Good morning.” 

“Night, dear. Sleep well.”

* * *

The next morning comes entirely too soon. It’s grey and wet and generally miserable, and the only good thing in the world is that even at six am, Jim is already at the office when Ed gets there and has a steaming hot latte waiting. He looks exceedingly smug about it.

“Oh, shut up,” Ed grumbles, and after he’s had a few restorative sips, “...thank you.” 

“Oh, don’t thank me, I’m sure,” says Jim tartly, and immediately adds, “I see it’s going to be a two cup morning,” because he hasn’t been working for Ed for this long without both of them being to stand each other no matter what the time of day.

“More like a five cup morning,” Ed says, and groans. “I don’t know how anyone survives without you, Jim. I need to go bury myself in the Sutherland Shipping reports-- I don’t think we need to worry about anyone coming in before seven.” They’d determined yesterday that between the lifts and the stairwell, there’s no way for them to know for sure when anyone’s arrived. There’s at least one way to get to the cubicles without passing the management office at all. Once they have someone installed in the main reception desk it will get easier, but for now they’ll be depending on no one wanting to trudge up the stairs, Jim picking up the ding of the lift arriving, and the workers being good enough to announce themselves with a bit of noise. 

He loses the next hour and half to catching himself up on the office’s latest project. Sutherland Shipping’s a fleet tracking system at heart, nothing unheard of but surprisingly well-specified for the type, and there’s a clever bit of cross-platform work that lets it operate on the largely obsolete system the client uses and also anticipates an upgrade to something more universal. Forward thinking, he likes that. The progress notes indicate their office suggested it, and he feels a bit of possibly misplaced pride. It’s good work, remarkably so given how much of it has been finished in the past week by frantic programmers, and a little bit of hope flutters about in his chest despite his well-honed cynicism. It’s too early to declare that he was right about this place... but what if he really was right about this place? 

Jim clears his throat politely from the doorway. “I count ten arrivals or so,” he says. “A few have walked by trying to get a peak in; I anticipate the crowd will arrive shortly, infinitely curious.”

He looks up, nodding his thanks. “I’ll start preparing the appropriately inspiring speech.” 

It will be a stressful day for the office; he has no illusions otherwise. Hornblower may have pushed the project through on the weekend, but the documentation will need finalising, and testing is looming over them like bad weather. They’d been running almost simultaneous development, test scenarios, and patches, thank God, and it could be done, would be done, but the mood is going to be tense. But if he can find the right vein of celebration, the proper fighting spirit that got them through this past week-- and hell, the weeks before-- it might be just the thing.

He has to be thoughtful with his timing. He’d planned on working while everyone came in, putting on a firm aura of Not To Be Disturbed and giving it enough time to stir up some whispers and gossip, inserting a little fear of Pellew, then addressing everyone together. Of course, at the time, he’d thought that Sutherland Shipping would need a few more weeks of constant effort fueled by reinvigorated good cheer. Thanks to Mr. Hornblower’s efforts-- which were enormous and he is grateful-- the situation is both more favourable and more delicate. 

He’s just double checked the overview and copied it over to a separate working copy for himself when he hears the conversation start outside. A volunteer, or the unluckiest in the herd?

The sacrificial lamb, he decides a moment later. The conversation is much too halting for it to be entirely voluntarily. Not Doughty, no, he’s in his element, brisk and cutting and never anything less than entirely professional; he’d had versions of this conversation a thousand times before. Thank god he’d let Ed poach him; he really was a treasure. But whoever the unlucky soul is he’s talking to, that voice is low and restrained, only unwillingly rising to the challenge of Doughty’s crisp professionalism. 

After a moment, Ed decides to reward the man’s patient, low tone, and it’s good timing anyway. He won’t be asking Doughty to stand down his guard of the gates, but he does need to remember what he’d realised yesterday: this isn’t the home office. This isn’t London. This is a crew counted in the tens, not the thousands. If he's going to lead them, if he's going to make something of this office, he needs to be accessible, he needs the men to feel they can approach him, that they can come to him with problems, suggestions, ideas. The men-- that's something else he needs to put on that list. Hopefully Tony's ahead of him there, at least.

He’s not going to announce himself with a bellow, no. A repeat of yesterday is not how he wants to begin this. He tucks his glasses into his pocket, and clears his throat, stepping out into the main office. 

“Good morning,” he says, pleasantly but not all the way to smiling. He has to look up to meet the eyes of the man-- he’s six-four at least and built like the proverbial large object, extra-large polo shirt stretched across his shoulders more than across his stomach. Casual workwear, Ed notes quickly, and his suit is going to make him look overdressed today but so much the better. 

“Morning,” the man says, awkwardly, glancing nervously at Doughty, who stays primly silent, and back at Ed. 

“Ed Pellew,” Ed says, and offers his hand.

“Andrew Silk.” Then, after a second of ginger handshaking, “Testing department.” 

“Good to meet you, Mr. Silk.” He does smile then, just enough to be reassuring. “I’m sure you have some questions. I’m Mr. Sawyer’s replacement. I’ll be expanding a bit more on that at our meeting this morning at nine-thirty. Short notice, I know, but we need to get this transition going.” 

“Uh,” says Silk. “Yes, sir.”

“Why don’t you spread the word for me?”

“All right.” A little grudging, but only as much as being drafted as town crier deserves. 

“Thank you. Are you and Mister Doughty done? I’d like to borrow him for a minute.” 

Silk nods and finds the correct pleasantry before making a quick exit, and Ed walks Doughty into his office with studied nonchalance. He closes the door before he lets a smile show. 

“Well?” 

“The troops are restless. They want to know if the office is closing.” 

“Well, we can put that one to rest quickly enough. Nobody’s losing their jobs anytime soon. And?” 

“Nearly everyone is here. It really isn’t much ‘everyone’. Buckland left a backlog of timesheets that need to be approved for payroll, they’re nervous about that, too. We’re still missing Hornblower and Bush, but then we expected that.” 

“Yes. If anyone asks, make it clear, please, that this meeting’s informal and nobody who can’t make it will get penalized. I’ll set up one-on-ones later to catch anyone who missed it.” 

“Lulling them into a false sense of security?” Doughty asks shrewdly. 

“Well. Maybe a little.” 

 

He spends the morning catching up on the inevitable pile of emails from the main office and mentally assembling a speech, and then he slips into the little conference room about ten minutes before the meeting’s due. 

It fills slowly at first-- a few punctual or extremely curious stragglers, and he shakes hands with ‘John Roberts, I’m in the design team’ and ‘Thomas Wolfe, Mister Pellew, head of the testing department’, and makes small talk with anyone brave enough to come early. At 9:30 on the dot, the conference room fills up -- small crew but smaller room, and some of the latest-comers have to drag chairs in from outside. 

He’s gotten through the formalities about the reporting and reassured everyone that the backed-up timesheets will be approved by the end of the day when he hears the knob turn-- a sheepish, ten-minutes late sound that he’s very familiar with. 

He deliberately doesn’t look as the door opens; he wants the focus up front on him, not on the latecomers. Out of the corner of his eye he recognizes Bush and Hornblower. Hornblower, he notes, is still unfairly attractive, but that’s not a business-hours thought and he puts it aside. 

“I’m aware of the troubled history of this satellite office,” he begins sternly, starting into the real meat of his speech. “So are you all, judging by the employment satisfaction surveys over the past few years.” That gets the expected half-hearted laugh. “Integrated Systems will be providing resources to address the very real grievances the recent crises have caused. But that isn’t why I’ve come.” 

“I’m here because your office has been doing piecemeal, one-off projects that don’t slot nicely into any of the departments in home office. You were hired as engineers and you’ve been treated like temporary contractors. I came here…” the briefest pause for dramatic effect, “because I remember why we actually wanted this office in the first place. Once, Integrated Systems believed that we could create a department dedicated to military contracts, with our best programmers, with a security and legal infrastructure that would allow us to bid quickly and confidently on cutting edge development projects that our competitors have monopolized for years.” 

Now they’re interested. “I’m here because this office has damn good talent that’s been going to waste. We can prove to home office that the old dream is still feasible. Those of you who who aren’t interested in this venture will have your chance to transfer. Those who stay are going to have an opportunity to be part of something very big from the beginning.” 

“The US Army has contracted us for an advanced vehicle tracking program, and those who stay will get a file on the specifics within the week. It’s going to need to be more secure, more robust, and a damn sight cleverer than anything we’ve done before. I want it for this office. This crew.” He lets that sink in, looks around the sea of wide eyes with satisfaction. 

“They’re calling it Project Hotspur, and if it goes well, it’s going to change the way this company does business.” He leans forward, palms flat on the conference table. “My name is Edward Pellew, and your days of hand-me-down projects are over.”

* * *


	4. Bill

The trouble with 'Aitch, and with other people dealing with ‘Aitch, is that he's so bloody hard to read. He's got such a negative-- externality, Bill guesses the word is. All the bad bits show up as misery and distaste and cold anger; all the good bits happen unseen, under the surface and that cold way he sets his face when he thinks he’s being ridiculous instead of normal or even amazing. Like the proverbial swan, really. Makes him come off as threatening and untouchable as the proverbial swan, too, all poise and beauty from a distance, sure, but peck your proverbial eyes out soon as look at you. You can see it all once you know what to look for, it’s so obvious once you know, but.... 

Bill misread him like everyone else does, at first-- wasn't predisposed to like having another flatmate, an unpleasant surprise after he'd signed up for a two-person occupancy (not as unpleasant a surprise as the utilities going up like they did on Maria, but still). Maria'd rung him up, let him know and make the choice, but it didn't leave him in any favourable frame of mind, even if he had agreed. And he'd come in, nose running and cheeks hot from the struggle up the narrow, wet metal stairs but back cold from the early-morning chill, laden and off-balance with his duffel bag and the first box he'd grabbed from the car, and there was this young man sat awkwardly on the settee, all rumpled polo shirt with the collar half tucked in and hip deep in his mobile, scowling at whatever was on there like a patrician of old. 

'Christ. Who is this nerd?' Bill had asked himself, with distaste. 'Did he dress in the dark?' 

Their introductions were awkward, and 'Aitch had held himself with what Bill took for cold aloofness and was actually, he understands now, his general hatred of giving his full name, poor Horatio Hornblower Yes Really. He'd offered to help with Bill's luggage and he'd completely hidden his shyness underneath a very good impression of being above it all. He'd been a good sport about it, Bill had to reflect now, but at the time he'd just been this closed-mouth, unwanted twat moving all his stuff God knew where while Bill’d helped Athena Styles unstrap his mattress from the top of her van and waited for his mates to show up. ‘Aitch had made lousy conversation and winced when Bill put his Mazda's stereo on like he had a problem with the Dashboard Confessionals and didn't want to wake the neighbours, like they weren't the absolute last block of flats on the street and the bottom two floors weren't a shut up daycare anyway.

For maybe the first month, Bill had assumed he was some sort of disgraced European model. He spoke French and Spanish, had friends all over the continent, apparently, was potentially bulimic-- lord knew how many times Bill had seen him make a face and head to the toilet with his toothbrush at work, and lord knew how many times he'd been quietly retching after supper at home-- and barely ate anything anyway. Also he was actually quite pretty in a hawk-faced way, but Bill held it against him. He didn't seem to be interested in sport, gaming, or music-- refused to discuss music entirely. There were rumours about him from the London office, which had seemed pretty credible the longer Bill spent with him. Look at this cold bastard. Absolutely the sort of man who'd wreck another man's career over relationship drama.

It's just that it’s such a good pokerface, isn’t it? It completely obscures the desperate paddling underneath. For whatever reason, Horatio would rather look like a complete bastard than let anyone see that he's tone-deaf, easily stressed, neurotic as hell, and twice as sweet. 

Bill didn't even know that Horatio liked him for the first three months. 

He'd come to grudgingly respect ‘Aitch for his work at the office, his reliability, the way he kept the projects moving forward and the other programmers organised and out of Buckland’s hair. Not to mention that he seemed to actually understand the nature of the corporate beast when seemingly no one else who wasn’t Buckland, Hobbs, or Sawyer had ever bothered to try. 

He didn't ask Bill to do his paperwork, booked his own meetings when he needed them, and wouldn't talk shit about whatshisface Simpson at the London office, even if he was rushing in late once a week because his deathtrap of a car kept breaking down. Bill’d offer him a ride, if Horatio was still fighting with the wreck when Bill was leaving, but that was just manners. Course, he’d almost driven off in pure rage the first time he’d offered and ‘Aitch had made some agonised faces and took forever to accept. (He knew now how even the thought of imposing made ‘Aitch break out in hives, but at the time he’d damn near drove over the snobby twat’s foot.) He’d known that Maria seemed to like him for reasons unknown, but he’d read 'Aitch's response to him as thinly veiled tolerance. And it was sort of unfair that he was really so pretty. The way he thought about things, all arch and smoldery. And his hands, Bill developed sort of a thing early on about resentfully liking how competent they were, the way even idle doodling was so elegant and deliberate and when he was working, really working... well. 

They were just very nice hands is all and what a shame they belonged to such a twat. 

Horatio wasn’t as bad as all that, he did figure that out-- the music thing, Maria and Bill had a brainwave about that at the same time. ‘Aitch had come wandering through the living room, face in a book, and Bill’d said: “Hey, it’s the new series, do you watch-?” 

“Watch what?” Horatio had asked, distracted, and Bill and Maria’d looked at each other because what other programme has opening music that goes woo-ee-oo? And then Horatio’d looked up, caught the streaming blue on the screen, and his eyes lit up. “Doctor Who! I forgot it was Saturday!” and flopped between them. 

Bill and Maria’d leant back to look at each other behind him, and asked each other silently: ‘tone deaf?’ 

It made things make more sense. And Bill started to track Horatio’s trips to the toilet, and noticed that his nausea correlated very nicely with his bouts of stress. 

Tone deaf. Weak stomach. Not actually a complete ice queen. Yes actually a bit of a queen. Bill kept running into sheepish men at breakfast-- Ozzy, a few times, looking well happy, blokes from the pub and seemingly half his pick-up rugby team giving him half-pleased, half-embarrassed smiles over toast. Obviously this Horatio had charm somewhere, just that Bill had never run into it. 

And then he ran into it. Well; no. He ran into an opposing forward. One moment upright and bolting towards the end of the pitch, rugby ball in hand, focused on the honour of the programmers-and-whoever-would-play-with-them in the face of the dockworkers-and-whoever-would-play-with-them. The next moment, flat on his back with a dazed impression of flying blond braids and stars still going off in his vision. 

He knew what'd happened seconds before he could make himself react to it-- his body felt sluggish, but he remembered these signs, the swimming, nauseous feeling, the ringing in his ears, someone shouting for a medic. Concussion, he told himself ruefully, and tried to open his eyes. The sky was bright and spinning slightly-- he shut them again. 

The world smelled like crushed grass and summer day and his sweat-drenched jersey, and he was clammy with sweat and feeling a bit like he'd been shoved into a tumble dryer and maybe a flash freezer at the same time. 

Then there were hands on his face-- fingertips, steadying him, and a gentle voice. "Bill? Bill, you've got to open your eyes." 

He blinked, and Horatio had teleported himself down from the sloping offside of the pitch somehow and was kneeling by him, blocking out the sun. His face looked odd, twisted up with worry. “Bill, are you all right?” 

"My leg," he realized, starting to panic, and hauled himself upright, to his immediate chagrin and a retch of breakfast trying to crawl up his throat and suddenly feeling really bloody awful after all. 

"Easy, you moron!" Maria's voice came from the blurry borders of the world. Less of a surprise, that. "You can get a new leg! They don't make prosthetic brains! ...not that you couldn't use one." 

"No. No, this is my bendy sports leg, it's expensive," he argued, but Horatio had a hand on his chest and was keeping him from trying to lean forward. He felt like he was tipping forward, anyway, and his voice sounded strange, slurry. His colours hurt, sharp and nauseous in his ears and his nose and his throat. He is actually going to be sick if the sky doesn’t turn it down. He might have hit his head harder than he thought.

"It's fine, Bill," Horatio soothed. "It's fine. Now, how many fingers am I holding up?" 

Bill looked at his fingers. Horatio had good hands, he'd always thought so, he was sure of it, thin, long fingers that still looked strong, so graceful. "You have pretty hands," he said earnestly. 

"Oh Christ, he is concussed." 

"It's hard to tell," Maria said darkly. "You've called the ambulance-? Good, thank you, thank God someone has some sense." That was to Silk, who knelt down and took his other side, and Bill leaned against him while Horatio looked him over. 

"What's the score?" Silk asked, a more sensible question than asking him to do math or name the PM. Very sensible question. That he was having trouble digging up the answer to.

"Four-six. No. Wait. No, I've got this--" 

He couldn't remember and he knew that meant overnight at hospital, goddammit, he hated going to hospital-- but Horatio had his hand and was gripping it tight while he wiggled out of his sweater and sort of tucked it around Bill’s shoulders, which were strangely friendly gestures for someone who Bill generally assumed just sort of tolerated him because neither of them had much choice about it. 

In the ambulance he'd wondered, a little, if he'd been wrong about Horatio not liking him the same way he'd been wrong about him being a music snob, but he forgot it in the whirl of hospitalisation and being prodded and having light shone in his eyes. He’d maybe had a knock on the head or two before, and they wanted to observe him, dammit, dammit, dammit, and tomorrow was Monday which meant that he couldn’t charm Maria or his mum or his sisters into visiting him because all of them worked or were at school. 

He was trying to sleep through the entire hospital stay, now that they were letting him sleep because there was less chance he wouldn’t wake up. And then someone shuffled in, and he looked up, and it wasn’t a nurse. 

It was Horatio. Carrying a cling-wrapped basket. He looked at Bill, and exhaled, and smiled-- possibly the first time Bill had ever seen him really smile. His long, bony face lit up like the sun, and his deep dark eyes seemed warm as anything. He’d actually been worried. Knowing that he had-- it blindsided Bill, how happy it made him. The expression disappeared quickly, but it seemed to be hiding under there somewhere. 

"Is that actually a fruit basket?" Bill asked, smiling lopsided because it obviously was actually a fruit basket. A handful of those little sweet oranges, a bunch of grapes, a pineapple making up most of the bulk. Horatio sat it on the table by the bed. 

"Mum always got them for me when I was laid up," Horatio said, and Bill caught movement out of the corner of his eye. Horatio was wringing his hands together, left hand cradled in his right, squeezing his own fingers in what could only be a nervous tic. He'd seen him do it before, but maybe it was that Bill had developed that thing about his hands or whatever, but Bill understood in a way he hadn't ever before that that stiff tone was Horatio's reaction to feeling shy. 

"It's fantastic, really," Bill said, and watched interested as the hand-wringing lightened up a notch and Horatio's straight-line mouth loosened into a little smile, just the shadow of the earlier big one. Big dark eyes, he had. Twinkly. 

"Maria said you didn't like hospital, so I thought. You know." 

"Yeah. No, really, it's brilliant, thanks." 

Horatio looked uncomfortable, stammered something at him, and it was like Bill'd suddenly been given subtitles to him, like the blow to the head had jarred something loose. _Cannot Handle Praise, Massive Self Esteem Issues._

You sweet stupid bastard, Bill thought. 

"Hospitals make my leg itch." He followed the glance down to his right leg, and the gap beside it under the covers. "Yeah, the other one. It's the only time I get that. Just. Two, three weeks in uni, after the accident, I was laid up. I was at City, you know, so it wasn't like Mum could come hold my hand all the time, she had work, and the team tried to visit but they had practice and school and all. It was hard for them all to come anyway, it was a small room." Horatio had, to his credit, never asked about it, never pried, and Bill usually was fine not giving the whole story, but something about Horatio not being able to handle a simple thank you made him want to make the silly git understand why it was important. 

"It wasn't on the pitch, you know? I was cutting through an alley on my way home, there was some car trying to back in. I was drunk. Driver wasn't, but whatever. Just. First I really understand of it is red taillights and fetching up against the bricks and next thing I know my leg's off and I'm just lying in a cold white room hurting. Just stuck. And it gets to you, being stuck." 

"Bill," Horatio breathed. 

"Come on, I'm not traumatized or anything. I just don't like hospitals. So-- you know, I'm glad you're here. It was good of you to come." 

"Of course. I mean, you're my friend." 

I am? Thought Bill, but it already sort of felt as if he had been for a while and not noticed it. That they'd been friends for ages, and he'd just needed to catch up. 

He grinned at Horatio, who grinned back, and lifted up the laptop bag he'd brought in. "So. I brought some movies, if you want." 

"Thank god." 

And they had cut the pineapple open-- well, ‘Aitch had cut, Bill had watched amused because the hospital basically didn't allow visitors to bring anything sharper than a butter knife and it was a bit of an adventure-- and they had eaten the fruit basket together over _Kind Hearts and Coronets_.

 

The understanding never faded. He still has his subtitles for Horatio. Which is why in the wake of Pellew's explosive little announcement he can look at the aloof expression, the mouth slightly pursed, the thousand yard stare, and understand that Horatio is paralyzed with excitement. He is actually both terrified and thrilled by this and he's put his face on autopilot so that he doesn't start babbling about one of the five-to-ten different scenarios that are whirling through his head as he tries to guess what the project's going to look like. Military contract means maybe something new, getting to develop and create; Bill knows that, at least.

Bill feels his mouth twitch, just right at the corner. 

The meeting breaks up after that; nobody's willing to ask the new boss any direct questions and they're too excited not to talk to each other. ‘Aitch and Bill were the last into the room and they have to be the first out, clearing the doorway to make room for everyone, standing shoulder to shoulder against the wall as Smith and DeCaille and Davis go by, and Wolfe comes out scowling the way he always does when there's a new project and work to be done. 

Pellew's the last out of the room, glancing at the pair of them and giving them a little nod, a smile that's not quite conspiratorial. 

"Sir," Bill says, nodding crisply back. 

"Mister Pellew," ‘Aitch says, with a stiff professionalism that Bill knows is frantic embarrassed shyness. 

"Good to be working with you again, Mister Hornblower. And Mister Bush." Then he's gone, and Bill watches Horatio's neck bob as he swallows. It's not just the great raging crush, either. ‘Aitch has questions, technical boffiny questions that he doesn't feel it's the right time to ask yet. That's a guess, but it's not a risky one, because this is how he is with every new project. And like every new project, he's going to sit on his questions for as long as he possibly can so that he doesn't feel he's second-guessing the management or stepping on toes. 

Fortunately, he's got Bill to step on toes for him now. Ignoring Horatio's little 'uh-', he strolls after Pellew. 

"How many of the details are sorted out yet, and how many questions are we allowed to ask?" he asks, as he gets into step with the older man, striding with him for the five whole yards over to his office. 

Pellew cocks a brow. "Details? Not many. Questions? You can ask all you like, although how many actually have answers yet..." 

"That's all right, I don't know the right questions to ask about the technical side of it. I don't expect we're re-inventing any wheels." 

"Wheels? From the initial specifications, the Americans want us to make the damn things fly via software. They'll be talked around, though. They want the bells and whistles, but only the cheap bells and whistles. The engineers will have a chance to play with some of their hardware." Pellew pauses and says, significantly: "They haven't made the official award yet. We're working on a handshake at the moment, and we've got to do enough to show willing without sinking a lot of manpower into it if they do decide they've got a better deal elsewhere. I don't have to tell you that doesn't leave the door of this office, of course." 

"Of course," Bill says, and doesn't consider it a lie even though he'll be talking it over with ‘Aitch tonight. It will be in an office talk capacity. “Can you tell us if we’ll be getting new heads?” 

Pellew inhales significantly. “Some.” 

It’s not a good inhale, but Bill’s not going to get anything else. 

Pellew doesn’t know him. Bill makes a good first impression, he knows he does, doesn’t have to think about it, but he’s not the instant camaraderie type and he’s quite happy to lack whatever conspiratorial air makes people peg you as someone they can tell dirty gossip to. He prefers to take things slow and build up his relationships. 

It’s just odd because usually people are building a relationship with him before they do Horatio; Horatio makes a uniformly bad first impression, Bill’s first meeting with him being more the rule than the exception-- Horatio says so, and Bill’s seen it happen. He’s just abstracted and chilly and awkward, and if Bill were willing to apply his process mapping skills to his personal life (he isn’t) he’d probably call it stage one. Stage one, thinking Horatio is a complete prat. 

Stage two, realizing that Horatio is a competent and almost likeable prat, who you get sort of fond of or at least you respect what he can do. Happens more quickly for some than for others, doesn’t happen ever for a few. Naming no names. Wolfe. 

But then there’s stage three, which is the bit where you realize he’s really something, the stage that happened with strong, lovely hands and pineapple for Bill. His bedpartners have generally leapfrogged from one to three in a single night, but in a professional setting it usually takes longer, months or more, like it did for Bill, and he had the added insights of living with the guy. 

Pellew’s already there at stage three. Pellew trusts and likes Horatio. Pellew was having a chat with him on Sunday-- Horatio said it was a disaster, that it was embarrassing and that he’d made an ass of himself, but Horatio is awful at noticing when he’s being respected. He always thinks it’s pity or bad judgment. Bill saw; Pellew knows he’s got an asset on his hands, a good man. 

Isn’t that interesting? 

“Well, I won’t keep you. Thank you, sir.” He dips his head respectfully, and strolls away again, towards the cubicles where ‘Aitch is trying not to stare too obviously. 

“Not at the fine details stage yet,” he reports, in a low tone. “But not just another patch job taking standard software and reconfiguring it for whatever cheap hardware, either. Might be a bit of fun.” 

“Might be,” Aitch says, unwilling to show that he’s at all excited, and Bill grins and elbows him as he slips past to his seat. 

He gets a fast, secret grin in return, and they have a little moment of mutual elation that’s promptly broken up by Wolfe elbowing in. 

“‘Bout time you two made it in,” he says, stomping up behind ‘Aitch’s cubicle. “In case you forgot, you left three weeks of work waiting for us. Hell of a morning for a lie-in.” 

It’s amazing, watching Wolfe acknowledge the superhuman workload ‘Aitch managed, but only so much as absolutely necessary to let him complain about the inconvenience it caused him. Bill’s aware of ‘Aitch’s excitement shuttering down like a seaside property for winter, and forces his voice level and professionally upbeat. “Has today’s work-plan been effective? Horatio pulled us out of the fire this weekend; let’s not stumble at the last hurdle.” 

It’s an artlessly mixed metaphor, but Wolfe isn’t one to notice. It’s more for ‘Aitch anyway, who would notice, but is most likely too busy to because he was complimented and now would be desperate to find somewhere to hide, even if just behind a frown. Sweet, neurotic man.

“Fine,” Wolfe grunts. “But we can’t possibly test everything in such a short time. We’re just making sure it functions in standard cases. We need two weeks to run a full suite of test cases.” 

Bill nods; that was the plan they’d shaped up on Friday. It’s too often the case in the industry, but that’s how beta software rolls out. Hell, if your lawyers are good enough, it’s how your production software rolls out. 

“Any bugs that aren’t complete show-stoppers can wait for patches,” ‘Aitch says, pulling himself back into the conversation. He doesn’t sound like Wolfe got to him at all; Bill wishes his poker face was anywhere near that good. Probably why ‘Aitch generally comes home from Poker Nights richer than he was leaving, and Bill ends up stood with a pint in whatever corner’s got the football. Well, one of the reasons why. “We’ll roll out the first one within the week. That’s not unusual. Has Robert’s got digital copies up for download so we can get it on their test fleet?” 

Wolfe scowls, but doesn’t actually have to tell them that his team hasn’t managed to clear that many test cases yet. “Just got him the first load before Pellew called that meeting.”

“Ask him to double-check the graphics, and then he can support your group. I’d like a pair of fresh eyes on that code. I’ll take over the new bits of the integration, and work on the bugs from testing. Bill, when will you absolutely need it uploaded to the server?”

Well, that’s Wolfe done. Bill keeps his smile in-- just. He’s starting to feel it now, that rush that comes from the pitch retreating under him and the goal line getting closer and closer. The air starts to sound like it’s humming. “One-thirty, two at the latest?” he says. They’ve gone over this before, but it’s good to say it again, to have someone else know the plan and see it and make it real, and report it back to the rest of the team. “That’ll give me time to get everything else organised for the client, as long as the download link can go live when I ring them at three.”

“Two at the latest it is,” Horatio says. His eyes are sparkling, he can feel it too, how they’re almost already there, over the last big drop of this shitstorm of a ride. He’s gorgeous, and Bill is not going to let this office let him down. “Let’s go, gentlemen; we have a project to deliver.”

 

It’s not that Bill actually expects it to all end in tears, but part of him is braced for disaster. It’s just so close, it’s been such a hell of a week,since he showed up with Horatio’s lunch, hell, since Sawyer promised beta over a weekend, and it’s only really now starting to feel like this office has dragged itself through something terrible and out into the fresh air. Everyone is working so hard now, Pellew’s announcement still ringing in the background, the clock ticking down to three--

Bill goes and makes himself some tea. It helps. He texts Rachel and asks her how her first day being eighteen is, and gets a selfie back; she’s at college with a cupcake shoved in her mouth and bright blue icing on her nose. That helps too.

He goes back to his cubicle and dives into his email, double-checking Horatio’s update-- remarkably coherent for something with a timestamp of seven thirty seven in the morning, when Bill knows he worked all the way through the night-- and integrates his documentation into the logs. It takes longer than he expects, there’s just layers of it, and he’s absolutely certain again that he’s getting ‘Aitch out of here as soon as product’s delivered because he deserves a week off for this, not just a few hours. By the time he’s done there’s new stuff from the testing group to catalogue, and he sets up a nice rhythm, updating the changes in the log and fiddling with the manuals and presentation files. 

It doesn’t last though, and he’d finished everything on Saturday, and there’s only so many times he can flip through the pages before going mad, so eventually he goes and fetches his second cup of tea, and when he’s sure the programmers are all happily tapping away, switches over to his internet browser and punches in the Queen Notorious url.

He’s just finished reading through a post about some poor intern and a lost poodle when he looks up and see’s Pellew’s assistant Doughty walk by the doorway, laden down with a box, and back a moment later, lighter.

Well. Doesn’t he just feel stupid. A week of no upper management, and he’s started to forget how it works. Shockingly, the boss might want to know about the product delivery this afternoon, if you can believe it. 

He forwards the original meeting request for this afternoon to Pellew-- okay, he stops for a few seconds, shakes his head, and tells himself to get a grip because yes, this is _Ed Pellew_ he is emailing, and the gossip has it that Ed Pellew makes grown men weep when they go over budget, but Ed Pellew is now his direct manager and leading this office. And really, the consequences of avoiding the chain of command because he was nervous are too dire and avoidably stupid to contemplate. So he sends the email off and goes to see Doughty, who, in the tradition of all PAs, is required by job description to read the email first, probably already has done, and should at least be expecting him.

It’s surreal that afternoon with the new team assembled in the board room for the call to the client-- surreal and deeply anticlimactic. Bill’s ears are almost ringing with high blood pressure and he doesn’t understand why until Pellew introduces himself over the phone and answers some question or another and he realizes that a part of him is still waiting for Sawyer to say something cruel or misinformed and drive them into a crisis. And Sawyer really isn’t here, it’s not going to be like that anymore.

Aitch is feeling it too. He keeps looking to Pellew before he answers questions-- there’s a somewhat peevish technician on the other side who’s tasked with the installation and obviously none too happy about it-- and Pellew simply nods and sits back and gives ‘Aitch free range to boffin at the other man until they reach some compromise or another about how they’re doing something or other technical to the firmware. There’s some scribbling of notes and an exchange of email addresses, but to Bill’s non-technical eye it seems to be wrapped up satisfactorily.

He wraps up the call and hopes his ending pleasantries sound natural.

“Well done, gentlemen,” Pellew says, as he stands to go-- he’s mostly talking to ‘Aitch, who almost freezes mid-sentence in whatever last notes he was scribbling down about the call.

“Ah. Thank you, sir,” he says, blinking, and Bill watches Pellew hide a faint smile. Not a mean one, he’s fairly sure-- stage three, he thinks again. Pellew’s not going to confuse an inability to take a compliment like a normal person for dismissiveness or rudeness like Sawyer did. Like most people do, frankly. Well, thank god. 

“Thank you,” he adds breezily, to remind both of them he’s still in the room. 

Pellew meets his eyes and he knows the other man is taking his measure just as much as Bill’s taking his, and they nod to each other seriously. 

He takes his thoughts back to his desk and chews on them for a while, working through his own notes from the call to make sure he isn’t making any stupid assumptions and hasn’t agreed to anything that will bite them in the arse later, and then, in the absence of anything he feels he has to do pressingly, he surfs back to Queen Notorious.

He knows he ought to be working on Sutherland stuff. Even he still has work to do, what with all the deliverables he took on in the wake of Buckland’s desertion. But nobody’s working-- well, Wolfes’ guys are, but they have actual test cases to do and not vague reports to write. Even so, the testing guys are buzzing at each other, the atmosphere’s that electric. Everyone’s stuck on this idea of this military contract thing, now that they can think about it, whether they believe it’s actually going to come to anything or not. Fuck’s sake, not even ‘Aitch is really working, getting up and pacing through one of the unused hallways and sitting down and getting up and doing it again. At one point he comes back with a cup of coffee and a surprised look-- that keeps him busy for twenty minutes of quiet sipping, and then he goes to return the cup and continues to pace, pace, pace.

Bill reads two more blog posts, and then it’s three and Horatio is back to his desk because perhaps he’s worn down the carpet in the hall to nothing and Bill gets up to intercept him. 

“Didn’t you say you were going home early?” he asks innocently, and drags him out. 

Horatio’s protests turn into actual sentences in the car park. “I should really be working on--” 

“Nope. Home we go.” Bill almost shoves him into the Mazda, grinning. “You were here all weekend and you’re my ticket out, too. You expect me to work after that bombshell?” 

“Yes! This is when we should be working, this is what you do, you work when you get new projects-- Wolfe’s right, Sutherland’s not done. Bill? Bill--” 

But Bill’s started the car and Horatio is really failing to lift a hand to stop him, leaning back against the seat smiling despite himself. 

“Bill. Christ, isn’t he amazing?” He rakes his fingers through his curling hair. “Oh no. Oh, I’m going to fuck this up, I’m not over it. I’m not over him, Bill.”

“You don’t say. You aren’t? I’d never have guessed.” 

“I can’t fuck this up, Bill. New projects. Real projects. Here. In this office.” 

“You won’t.” Bill grips his leg. “You won’t, you’re too good at your job.” 

‘Aitch groans, wincing away from praise but linking their hands for a squeeze just the same. 

The flat’s quiet; Maria’s out for another hour at least. Bill pauses inside the threshold, wondering if maybe staying at work would have been better-- he’s too keyed up to sit quietly, the flat seems too small for the rest of the day. 

Then Horatio’s on him, all arms and lips, and coming home early was the best idea. Horatio, taller than him, is trying to climb him, and they stagger up against the door with a thump. Bill starts to chuckle and then Horatio gets into one of his nervous giggles and they’re just falling all over one another, kissing sloppily between jags of laughter. 

It’s celebratory, is what it is, Bill feels, that’s what the hurry is. That’s why everything feels so bright and sharp. Just big happy feelings and nervous tension trying to find their way out of Horatio. He sucks thoughtfully on Horatio’s neck, trying to taste the genius percolating, and for his efforts he gets a bitten-off yelp.

“Ticklish? Sorry.” 

“Do it again.” 

Bill hoists him up, round bum and skinny legs, waddles him through the living room still trying to kiss him. It only goes so well-- he catches his elbow and Horatio’s knee on the doorframe heading into his bedroom-- and flops onto the bed with Horatio on him. 

“Got to my get my leg off,” he mutters into Horatio’s mouth. 

“Yeah-?” 

“Yeah. You up to-?” he pushes his hips into Horatio illustratively. 

“Uh. Yes?” 

“Get the stuff.” 

The feeling of urgency has infected him and his fingers don’t want to work-- his trousers keep catching as he wiggles them off and then there’s unpinning and unsealing seems to take forever, and Horatio’s back before he’s got his liner off, pretty long fingers sliding in alongside Bill’s to help roll it off of his stump. 

“Ooh.” And then, because Horatio is blowing cool air on the exposed skin, “Ooooh.” It’s the same sensation as getting a shoe off after a long day, only more of it, and he flops backwards with a grin. 

It’s like coming off a rollercoaster, or out of an exam. Everything is wobbly, too bright, too loud-- even him, he’s sure he’s shouting, he can’t control it. It’s exhilarating, exhausting. ‘Aitch smiles at him, and he slumps onto the mattress under the weight of it, letting his arms dangle.

“Feeling lazy, are we?” Horatio teases, and there’s red on his cheeks like he’s been out in the cold. He’s beautiful, he’s so gorgeous, Bill wants to open up and swallow him with his whole body.

“Absolutely am. Get to work, I’ll be here thinking of England.” He can’t stop the little laugh, too loud, too dirty. He hasn’t felt this pleased in ages.

Horatio laughs and climbs up over him, kissing him, tugging at his shirt, trying to get enough purchase on the buttons with the hem trapped under Bill’s ass, pulling everything crooked.

“Leave it, I need those.” He grabs for Horatio’s hands. 

Bill’s fucked around with other men. Not many, not usually his bag, but he knows how he likes a spot of buggery-- glove, grease, and go. No fiddly business. Other men aren’t Horatio, though, don’t have those gorgeous hands. Horatio doesn’t think they’re gorgeous, of course, Horatio has what seems to be an inverted understanding of his own beauty, but he accepts that Bill likes them, mostly because Bill’s been telling him so for over a year now.

Bill sucks two of his fingers into his mouth. Horatio gives him this amused puzzled look and strokes his chin with his thumb, and Bill takes a good long few seconds exploring the knuckles and tips of the fingers with his tongue before he lets them go. 

Spit’s not going to be enough, of course, and Horatio fussily inspects his fingers to make sure the nails are even (because he’s a sweet, neurotic boy is why) snapping on a glove (...again, because he’s a sweet neurotic boy and is giving Bill a doctor’s fetish, maybe) and drizzling his fingers with lube. 

Two go in with a hot stretch, on the edge of actually unpleasant for about half a second, and then just right. 

“You can do that forever,” Bill informs him, feeling all molten except for where Horatio’s fingers are in him, crooking and hard. It’s its own special thing, this, he loves feeling spitted on Horatio’s fingers, being played like an instrument. If ‘Aitch’s keyboard feels anything like this when he’s coding-- okay, that’s a stupid thought and he’s not so far gone to follow it through, but oh Christ he feels fantastic. ‘Aitch’s hands are gorgeous and magic and Bill feels like he could actually maybe be glowing, and tries to tell ‘Aitch so except he just sort of repeats himself. “Forever, really perfect, oh--” Horatio’s amazing when he’s all lit up like this, when his dark eyes are fiery and basically you just want to go anywhere he takes you. 

“Want to finish up this way-?” And he sees Horatio recalibrating his plans, brain going whirr whirr whirr, and that sweet, soft smile he gets when he’s made Bill happy. 

“Forever until you fuck me,” he clarifies. 

It feels a bit like forever, even if it’s probably only another minute or two of Horatio kissing his stomach and gently fishing for his prostate while Bill’s lungs go like a bellows. Long, slender fingers like long slender ‘Aitch crawling right into him, they’re not quite enough on their own but they’re really lovely and his brain chases the idea for a minute that he really could do nothing but this ever again except that oh god something trips over and what he really needs right now is something fast and hard and liable to dent the wall. 

He gives the word and the glove comes off, peeled into the trash, the condom comes on, and Horatio’s nudging his way in as Bill lies on his back, rolls his hips up, right knee nearly by his ear. There’s that long slow slide, Horatio watching his face so carefully-- he kisses the air at him, to make him laugh, and because he’s just so fucking pleased. He’s no size queen, but the first fill, tense hot and just this side of too tight, it’s a good thing. Horatio’s ridiculous hair bounces as he starts to thrust and it’s just pretty, all right, and his thin hips fit between Bill’s thighs like a dream as he strokes deliberately in and out and Bill shoves his hips a little helplessly to make him go a bit faster _if_ you please. 

“That’s good, ‘Aitch, that’s really good. Christ you’re the best.” 

And here’s the secret to complimenting Horatio the way he deserves-- you have to short his brain out with sex first. He seems to like Bill’s voice and he can have all of it he likes-- beautiful, perfect ‘Aitch, and Bill tells him so and feels the thrusts into him speed up. He can feel himself running at the mouth, just babbling about the myriad ways that ‘Aitch is actually perfect, from the top down, because it just feels so good and he’s really just so happy.

‘Aitch is starting to whine, a raspy, rumbly, needy sound a little like his Vauxhall, actually, and the thought catches Bill like a missed pass to the gut and he laughs out loud, abs scrunching like he’s doing crunches. He has to clutch at Horatio’s shoulder to keep his balance, and then Horatio’s laughing a little too, uncertain, flushed and lit by the dim light sneaking in Bill’s window, and now Bill can’t really stop laughing, not all the way. 

“You’re so pretty,” he says, smiling so wide he feels like he’s just spilling open. “You’re amazing, you did it all this week. God look at you, how are you so fantastic, oh Christ, ‘Aitch, that’s perfect-- hard, like that, you’re just so gorgeous.” 

Maybe he’s trying to outrun the compliments, because Horatio finds it in himself to go just a little harder, a little faster, and Bill loses track of what he’s saying entirely, if there are words or just sounds, if he’s laughing or just breathless, and he’s pretty sure his eyes are about to cross. Feels like no time after that before ‘Aitch is making apologetic noises and he’s making happy ones, go on, then, and he tries to bend himself in half so that he can get Horatio in just that bit deeper on the last hard, jackrabbit thrusts. 

“Ooh, ‘Aitch,” he starts as Horatio shakes, eyebrows drawing down, giving him that little wrinkle between his eyes as he tries to hold himself back, pants ‘Bill, Bill,’ at him, and pitches forward to cut off both of them with a kiss.

He sags down when he’s finished, shaking on his elbows, still kissing Bill, sloppy, broken through with half-strangled gasps and poor attempts at Bill’s name. Bill’s not in much better shape, hoisting himself up against the headboard until he’s sitting back, Horatio sliding out of him in the process, a deliciously filthy feeling. 

‘Aitch rallies enough to get the condom off and tied, pulls back to smile shyly at him, pleased and sweet through his lashes and for someone who just gave his best go at fucking Bill in actual half that is just unfair. Then he leans in and kisses Bill some more, reaching down between them to wrap his hand around Bill’s which is already around his dick and when had he done that? 

He has some vague memories of grabbing for himself, saying “You’re so pretty, how are you so pretty,” actually, come to think of it, but then ‘Aitch gently rolls his balls and he loses his brain again, nevermind his memory. 

“More of that,” he manages, and then tips back and gives it up for gone. 

He pumps himself on automatic, everything lost in feeling so good and so well fucked and so filthy while Horatio fumbles around for something over the edge of the bed, kissing at Bill’s belly and his thighs. He hears another glove snap on, and that gives him one arousal-slowed second of anticipation before ‘Aitch slides his fingers back into him and oh Christ that’s amazing. Bill’s sore and not sore, nerve endings generally having a party, and it feels so smooth and good and then ‘Aitch lets go of his balls and reaches up and slips two fingers from his other hand into Bill’s mouth and he has him at both ends and there’s nothing much more Bill can do at that point but suck and come.

Horatio just watches him for a while with a pleased look, as he pants and his heart stops trying to hammer its way out from behind the ribs, and then gives him a quick kiss and hops up to get cleaned up. Bill can hear the water running now, since his ears aren’t rushing, and he lies back happily because he doesn’t have to get back up or put his leg back on, he can stay right here. 

‘Aitch comes back with a damp towel for Bill, but Bill doesn’t let him really do much with it-- he puts on his most winning smile and pulls him back into bed, towel smushed between them as Bill just kisses him, lazy and so content. 

Eventually the pauses between the kisses get longer and longer and the towel cools, and so does Bill; he moans and rolls and struggles out of his sweaty shirt. ‘Aitch pulls the duvet up over them and that’s really nice, so Bill kisses him again, and then his phone starts to buzz and ring and he opens his eyes and Horatio is fast asleep and the sun is setting.

He has to lean way over the bed to grab his trousers and fish the vibrating phone out of the pocket; Horatio mumbles and curls away to keep sleeping. It takes a few tries to get the phone to respond to his thumb-swipe; his eyes are still too fuzzy with sleep to read the number. “Bush,” he says, in a way he hopes sounds curt and businesslike instead of incoherent. 

“Bill, it’s Roberts.” 

Bill sits up, earning another mumbly complaint from Horatio. 

“What’s up?” 

“We’re down at the pub. Thought you might already be here, early as you left-” 

Bill pulls the phone away from his ear to check the time. Almost six; must have needed the nap more than he thought, and he’s not even the one who’s been pulling the horrific hours. 

“-but plenty of time to join us. Just thought a get together would be nice, with the new projects and all.” 

“Yeah. Sounds brilliant, actually.” 

“Hornblower around? He’s invited too.” 

Bill looks down at the figure all curled up in the duvet, smiles so fondly. “Nah, he’s busy. If I see him I’ll ask. But I’ll come. Yeah, bye-- see you then.” 

Horatio doesn’t really mind pub nights, but they aren’t his favourite thing, and Christ he needs the sleep. Bill’d practically stood guard over him to make sure he got enough Sunday. Still, just in case, Bill nudges him awake. 

“Work’s getting together for drinks. Want to go-?” 

Horatio’s expression answers before he can put a polite denial together-- the idea of leaving bed crosses his eyes and leaves behind a trail of horror and misery. 

“Right.” Bill laughs softly. “Get some more sleep. That’s an order.” 

‘Aitch doesn’t notice the facetiousness, just smiles at him and rolls back into the duvet. Bill beams down at him for a while, and then scoots to the edge of the bed and uses his right foot to drag his leg over, starts to get dressed again. 

 

The pub’s oddly quiet when he gets there-- crowded and quiet, a mass of programmers and testers around a bunch of pulled together tables, and they greet him with a big jolly ‘Hey, Bill, heard you did well with the client, Bill’ and it sounds forced. All the laughter does. 

Everyone’s exhausted. Not like ‘Aitch has been, not the same level of sleep deprivation, but it’s been-- 

Christ, it’s been awful, hasn’t it? Pellew’s crisp brand of normality has put a period on months and months of horror. It had come to seem almost normal at the time. Getting dropped leaderless into the end of a project had seemed like just one more awful punch to roll with instead of the sort of crisis it actually was. For fuck’s sake, Sawyer could have _killed_ Wellard, and everyone had been shocked, but had any of them been surprised?

He gets himself a pint at the bar and wedges a chair in between Roberts and Smith. They ask him what he thinks about Southampton’s chances on the weekend, Silke leaning over past Hether and Davies to join in, and it’s an easy enough conversation to fall into without getting too deep, because everyone’s half staring at the cricket game on the set in the corner and half at their phones and using whatever they have left to try for a good time. It goes around the table, people going up to get more pints for everyone, and he does his round dutifully.

A while later he goes to put his empty down and it clinks against one of his others. He stops to count; he’d been drinking along with Roberts and he’s had three. He checks the clock on his phone and frowns at it, sure he’s got the time wrong. 

No, it’s a half hour walk from the flat to the pub, so he’d have got here at half six, and it really is only half seven. Good god, it’s a good thing he walked tonight. He’s going to have to slow down. They all probably should, but he’s not about to tell anyone else how to handle themselves. 

He gets a bottle of cider instead of another pint, promises himself he’ll nurse it, and it turns into two bottles, which he only notices when he’s up at the bar buying his third. A quick check-- eight. All right. He’s feeling it, he knows-- there’s that deceptive clarity where things feel very sharp and focused but he’s also just a second behind himself reflex-wise. 

He hears the door open but doesn’t look away from the set until Roberts says “Hornblower! Thought you weren’t coming!” 

Then he does, and a sharp shot of adrenaline brings him up to normal speed because ‘Aitch is standing in the doorway ash white and clammy looking. 

“I’m sorry. I was going to text,” he tells the pub at large, sounding like he’s talking around a lump in his throat, and waves his phone uselessly. 

“No worries, come sit down-- What’s wrong? You all right?” 

“I. Um.” Aitch shakes his head. 

“Has something gone wrong?” Smith says, a note of despair in his voice amplified by all the beer. 

“No! No. No, it’s not like that.” Horatio scowls at nothing, angry and upset. He slips his hands behind his back, ends up looking like he’s standing at parade rest and about as standoffish as possible, but Bill knows it’s just that he’s trying not to show how he’s clutching at his hands, and the rest of them have either figured that out or have figured out ‘Aitch enough to know he means nothing by it. “I’d just-- I put in my application for Buckland’s job. It was stupid.” 

“Turned you down?” Robertson asks with sympathy. “Yeah, me too.” 

“No, they want me to interview. On Monday.” 

“Oh god _dammit,_ Hornblower,” Robertson says, rolling his eyes, and that’s enough for a laugh, a big desperate laugh that rolls into something like a celebration after all. 

Bill takes his feet and goes to stand casually-- if a bit unsteadily-- next to ‘Aitch, squaring himself to elbow away anyone who looks like they’re drunk enough to try to hug him, but he can’t resist leaning in and murmuring “Of course they do, of course they want you to interview,” and getting an embarrassed grunt in reply.

It’s almost like a party after that-- enough like a party that Horatio’s starting to fold in on himself with embarassed introversion after choking down one whole drink, and Bill leans his head on his shoulder. It’s a warm shoulder, lean and hard. Well done, ‘Aitch, being so tall. 

“D’you need to go home?” 

“I don’t need to,” Horatio mutters fiercely. 

“But you want to, so we should,” he murmurs back matter of factly. Ridiculous boy with all these social obligations that are basically only in his own curly head. Bill realises he’s got his head on Horatio’s shoulder, still, and promises himself he’ll straighten up in just a moment. But leaning against him, all warm and fond… all right, but everyone’s here and he supposes it’s not the time and place, so he sways back up to his feet. 

“I should stay--” 

“I should probably stop drinking,” Bill says, and means it. 

“...ten more minutes?” 

Bill nods, his head feeling oddly heavy. “Long as you like. But I’m ready whenever.” 

“Thank you.” It’s just a whisper. 

Bill drifts off and lets him do his socially social things that he thinks he needs to do-- has a few glasses of water at the bar. It’s sinking in that it’s only Monday and tomorrow is Tuesday and a workday, so he’ll just hydrate desperately and swallow some paracetamol at home and pray. 

Hydration leads to the other, the other leads to him standing in the toilet letting cold water run over his hands long after they’re clean-- he presses his cold wet palms to his heated face. It’s visibly red in the mirror but it doesn’t look as puffy as it feels. He’s got a stupid happy face on, he’s so pleased for ‘Aitch, he could _really_ go for some chips--

“Oh shit--” the door opens. “I’m sorry, didn’t know there was any-- Bill-?” 

It’s Horatio. Bill turns his massive beaming smile on him-- feels like he’s one big smile all over. “Ready to go-?”

“Soon. You’re all right? Do you need to sit down a while?” 

He shakes his head, ignoring the sloshing feeling and trying to make it look natural. 

“Can I-- talk to you?” 

“Yeah.” 

Horatio turns and wriggles the door lock shut with a lot of squeaking. “Bill, I want this job.” 

“Of course you do.” 

“I’m _terrified_.” 

Oh. Horatio must have been drinking a bit while Bill wasn’t. He’s not nearly as far as Bill but there’s dutch courage in that honesty. His eyes are gleaming, brighter than usual in his drawn face, ill-looking under the single pull-light, and Bill’s heart just suddenly fills up his chest.

“I know, ‘Aitch. But you’re going to be brilliant, all right?” 

Horatio just stares at him, all stricken looking. “Bill,” he says.

“All right?” Bill repeats, and can’t help it, he just has to give ‘Aitch his whole stupid smile, because he is so proud of him and it’s ‘Aitch and ‘Aitch is fantastic.

“I’m going to fuck it up, Bill. I always fuck things up. I can’t make a good first impression to save my life.”

Okay, that is actually true. But. “Bull,” Bill says, and sways back a little to lean against the wall, facing ‘Aitch across the narrow toilet. “You’ve already made your first impression-- your CV, your work. They liked you, you’re fantastic, you basically did half of Sutherland Shipping by yourself. Pellew _wanted_ you to apply, you know he thinks you’re all right.”

Horatio looks horrified, and Bill can’t help it, he rocks forward and reaches out. “Okay?” He says, and when ‘Aitch nods, face drawn up in misery, he pulls ‘Aitch into him in a crushing hug and both of them back against the wall because he’s not that unsteady but as skinny as he is, ‘Aitch is tall enough that there’s a lot of him to hold on to. “Okay?” he says again, and ‘Aitch nods again, so he holds on, rubbing a little at ‘Aitch’s back.

“You’re going to do just fine,” he says. “You’re perfect for this job. This past week has shown it, everyone was so glad to let you take lead, you were the best choice. Look at how happy they all were for you tonight. Things are going to turn around here. Pellew’s here, Sawyer’s retired, we’ve got that military contract to start-- Christ, you’re going to be fantastic at that.”

Horatio moans a little, but he’s still clinging, so Bill knows the compliments haven’t completely ruined him yet. “You’re the natural choice,” he says. “You know this office, you know how things work here, and you’ll have a week of insight into Hotspur already. Maybe I’ll have to start calling you boss.” Christ, Horatio is so much better than he gets recognition for. Bill is so, so proud of him. He deserves this job. “And hey,” he adds, “you get to go to London on company time. You can see your friends, maybe see an actual film, get some real coffee--” 

He has to stop then because ‘Aitch is kissing him, as desperate as this afternoon, pushing him hard against the wall. “Oh god, Bill,” he says finally, out of breath, mouth still open a centimetre from Bill’s, leaving Bill to sort of helplessly keep kissing, trying to reach him. “You can’t believe all of that.” 

“I do, I really do,” Bill says, and reaches up to pat at Horatio’s poor miserable face. “How about I call you ‘boss’ for the rest of the night, get you warmed up for it?”

“Oh god stop,” ‘Aitch whines, and kisses him again in case he gets any ideas. He’s panting and all brilliant eyed and getting some colour back but not much. “Oh, Bill. How much have you had.” 

“Too much,” he reports honestly. “You might have to share your coffee tomorrow, boss." That’s a joke. He would never drink Ozzy’s coffee.

“I wasn’t thinking about-- nevermind.” Aitch bites his bottom lip hard. 

“Joking. There’s not enough in the world for that. I’m not fit to drive anywhere but I’m all right, ‘Aitch. You feeling sick or something? You need a hand?” 

“No, no, I’m fine.” Horatio looks into his eyes, waves a finger across his vision and watches him track it, and then nods determinedly. “Stay there?” 

“What?” Bill says, puzzled, and then Horatio’s on his knees- “Oh--” and going for his flies “ _oh-_ , oh, yeah, all right, I don’t think I’ll be able to kneel--” 

“Hush.” Horatio works his zip down, his hands cool but then his mouth is hot and wet and really perfect. Bill is instantly flushed all over, panting, sweating-- and it’s a really, really good thing he’s had so much practice this past year keeping it down so they don’t bother Maria because the entire office is just outside that door and that cheap lock holy fuck what if someone wants to use the toilet. 

“Oh Christ, ‘Aitch,” he says, looking down, and then slaps his own hand over his mouth to keep from saying anything else any louder because he was not ready for the sight of ‘Aitch on his knees and them both all in their clothes because holy fucking Christ he’s just stood there against the toilet wall with his flies open getting his dick sucked in a pub.

His head is spinning, not just from beer, actually mostly not from beer, mostly from the heat and the suction and the idea that he’s never actually done this in a public toilet before, and good thing they keep it so clean here or ‘Aitch would never do this, and then those thoughts wander off and he’s just staring down at the curly hair bouncing as Horatio’s head bobs and his whole inside is going hot and throbbing and everything gets even swimmier because the blood is all leaving his brain. 

Big warm hands on his thighs, Horatio’s mouth so sweet and determined. “Um. Um-? ‘Aitch-?” he warns around his fingers, only politeness really oh god that’s so good he can’t-- 

His eyes close and he slumps back as it hits him like a chest-tackle without the bruised ribs, it just knocks him over, or feels like it does. That is probably the beer, though. Horatio stays with him, sucking gently until he’s through and just gasping with his own hand still clutched over his mouth. Then ‘Aitch’s mouth is gone, his hands so gentle as he tucks Bill back in, and Bill just keeps his eyes shut while Horatio shuffles around and does something with paper towels and runs the tap and spits. 

“Thanks?” he murmurs, cracking an eye. His face is back in that dopey smile; he can feel it aching around his cheeks. “You know, if you were standing, I could sit--” 

Horatio shakes his head. “No. You don’t mind, do you? This was just-- it was something I wanted to do?” 

“A little. S’all right.” Silly boy. Silly, silly boy. “Let’s go home.” 

Horatio beams at him, eyes all twinkly. “Right.” 

Silk is waiting patiently for the loo when they step out-- Bill’s a little guilty about that, but not too much. He gives the pair of them an odd look but that’s about it. Bill’s not going to kick a fuss, all right, so someone knows and it’s not the most professional behavior, but it’s no worse than this pub has seen before 

Horatio turns beetroot, though-- which, at least, is colour-- and drags Bill away and out the door as soon as possible. 

The night air is crisp and smells like salt and motor oil blown in from the docks; Horatio wraps an arm around him and Bill leans gratefully into him. The walk always takes longer on the way back if Bill’s had a few, but it’s got a timeless quality tonight. Seems like one second he’s humming ‘for he’s a jolly good fellow’ and knowing Horatio doesn’t know it’s for him because the tone deaf thing, and the next he’s falling into bed and someone’s making him drink water and swallow some painkillers and then covering him with the duvet, and all in all what a wonderful night.

* * *


End file.
